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Home , 36D, Aceh River, Beb Vuyk, Berastagi, Cornelis Kruseman, Hamengkubuwono I

F Cultivated Tastes G

Colonial Art, Nature and Landscape in the Indies

A Doctoral Dissertation by Susie Protschky PhD Candidate

School of History University of New South Wales Sydney,

Contents

Acknowledgments …………………………………………………………….. iii List of Abbreviations ………………………………………………………….. v List of Plates …………………………………………………………………… vi

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Introduction ……………………………………………………………………. 1

Part I — Two Journeys Chapter 1: Landscape in ……………………………………….. 36 Chapter 2: Dutch Views of Indies Landscapes …………………………………. 77

Part II — Ideals Chapter 3: Order ………………………………………………………………. 119 Chapter 4: Peace ………………………………………………………………. 162 Chapter 5: Sacred Landscapes ………………………………………………… 201

Part III — Anxieties Chapter 6: Seductions …………………………………………………………. 228 Chapter 7: Identity – Being Dutch in the Tropics …………………………….. 252

Conclusion …………………………………………………………………….. 293

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Glossary ……………………………………………………………………….. 319 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………... 322

ii Acknowledgments

First, I would like to express my gratitude to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales for granting me an Australian Postgraduate Award between 2001 and 2005. The same Faculty funded two research trips abroad, one to the Netherlands in 2004 and another to in 2005. Without these sources of funding this thesis would not have possible.

In the Netherlands, I must thank Pim Westerkamp at the Museum , Delft, for taking me on a tour through the collection and making archival materials available to me. Thanks also to Marie-Odette Scalliet at the University of Leiden, for directing me toward more of her research and for showing me some of the university library’s collection. I also appreciate the generosity of Peter Boomgaard, of the KITLV in Leiden, for discussing aspects of my research with me. Thanks to the staff at the KIT Fotobureau in , who responded admirably to my vague request for ‘landscape’ photographs from the Netherlands Indies.

I am grateful to my fellow postgraduate Iskandar Nugroho for introducing me to his sister Lina in Indonesia, who kindly extended her hospitality to me in 2005.

In Sydney, I would like to thank Adrian Vickers for assisting with some tricky questions on Nusa Penida; Peter Worsley, for sharing his views on landscape in classical Javanese poetry (and generously providing me with a then-unpublished paper on the topic); and particularly Robert Aldrich, with whom I have had the pleasure of an association since my undergraduate days at Sydney University, and who has always been generous with advice and encouragement. Thanks to Jacqui Verbeek, my best friend and a formatting genius, for helping me so much with the plates. Thanks also to my comrades in the School of History, Sally Cove, Nevenko Bartulin and Matt Fitzpatrick, who have been good friends and formidable postgraduate colleagues.

iii Special thanks to Jean Gelman Taylor, whose expertise, guidance and example have left a deep impression upon me. I have been most fortunate to learn from her,

Thank you finally to my wonderful parents, Robert and Gabriele Protschky, for their love and support, and to Tyrone Berger, who lived this experience with me and to whom I would like to dedicate this thesis.

iv List of Abbreviations

KITLV (Koninklijk Instituut Voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde) = Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies KIT = (Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen) Royal Tropical Institute KNIL (Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger) = Royal Netherlands Indies Army KPM (Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij) = Royal Packet Voyage Company Persagi (Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia) = Union of Indonesian Artists VOC (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) = United Company WIC (West Indische Compagnie) = West India Company

v List of Plates

(Appearing at the end of each Chapter) (There are no plates for Chapter 7)

Introduction

Map: The Indonesian Archipelago [Source: MC Ricklefs (2001) A History of Modern Indonesia Since c 1200 (3rd Ed). Palgrave, Basingstoke: p 471].

Chapter 1

Plate 1: The Pool at , (), Viewed Through the Bars of the ’s Watch Tower [Source: Author’s own photograph, 2005].

Plate 2: Ida Bagus Made Togog, Anoman, Rama and Laksmana in the Midst of the Nandaka Forest (1932) [Source: Jean Couteau (1999) Museum Puri Lukisan. Ratna Wartha Foundation, Ubud: p 51].

Plate 3: Theo Meier, Purification by the Sea (1979) [Source: Garrett Kam (1993) Perceptions of Paradise: Images of in the Arts. Yayasan Dharma Seni, Ubud: p 102].

Plate 4: Bas Relief, [Source: Author’s own photograph, 2005].

vi

Plate 5: Gunungan Puppet, (19th Century) [Source: Helen Ibbitson Jessup (1992) Court Arts of Indonesia. The Asia Society Galleries, New York: figure 37].

Chapter 2

Plate 1: Anonymous, The Battle of Bantam (1601) [Source: George S Keyes (ed) (1990) Mirror of Empire: Dutch Marine Art of the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: p 327].

Plate 2: Antoine Payen, The Coast of Ambon from Batu Merah (1824) [Source: Marie-Odette Scalliet (1995) Antoine Payen: Peintre des Indes Orientales. University of Leiden, Leiden: plate 42].

Plate 3: Woodbury and Page, Kota Ambon from Batu Merah (1868) [Source: Steve Wachlin (1994) Woodbury & Page, Photographers: Java. KITLV Press, Leiden: p 139].

Plate 4: Woodbury and Page, Gang Scott, (1863) [Source: Scott Merrillees (2000) Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs. Curzon, Surrey: plate 83].

Plate 5: Kampung Batu Gantung [Source: HJ de Graaf (1972) Ambon in Oude Ansichten. Europese Bibliotheek, Zaltbommel: plate 62].

Plate 6: Trestling & Co (after FC Wilsen), Mt Ophir on ’s West Coast (1865-76) [Source: John Bastin and Bea Brommer (1979) Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia. Spectrum, : p 83].

vii

Plate 7: Mt Kelud After its Eruption (1902) [Source: (1982) Komen en Blijven. Querido, Amsterdam: p 73].

Plate 8: Abraham Salm, Wild Landscape (undated) [Source: Richard Hamblyn and Yu-Chee Chong (1991) Java. Naar Schilderijen en Tekeningen van A Salm. Gallery Editions, Singapore: p 59].

Chapter 3

Plate 1: Woodbury and Page, Still Life with Tropical Fruits (1879) [Source: Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk (2001) Het Indië Boek. Waanders Uitgevers, Zwolle: p 112].

Plate 2: Colonial Interior with Shells [Source: Rob Nieuwenhuys (1998) [First published 1981] Baren en Oudgasten. Querido, Amsterdam: p 157].

Plate 3: Attributed to David de Meyne, Bird’s-Eye View of Ambon (c 1617) [Source: Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate (1991) Pictures from the Tropics. KIT, Amsterdam: p 21].

Plate 4: Joseph Poelinck, King Willem I (1819) [Source: Kees Zandvliet (2002) The Dutch Encounter with Asia 1600–1950. Amsterdam, Amsterdam: p 290].

Plate 5: Raden Sjarief Bustaman Saleh, (1838) [Source: Kees Zandvliet (2002) The Dutch Encounter with Asia 1600–1950. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Amsterdam: p 86].

viii Plate 6: JWB Wardenaar, The Regency of Probolinggo (c 1800) [Source: Leo Haks and Guus Maris (1995) Lexicon of Foreign Artists who Visualised Indonesia (1600–1950). Gert Jan Bestebreurtje, Utrecht: plate C37].

Plate 7: Abraham Salm, In the Tengger Ranges (undated) [Source: Richard Hamblyn and Yu-Chee Chong (1991) Java. Naar Schilderijen en Tekeningen van A Salm. Gallery Editions, Singapore: plate 7].

Plate 8: P Lauters (after AJ Bik), Nova Curia Bogoriensis (1835–49) [Source: John Bastin and Bea Brommer (1979) Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia. Spectrum, Utrecht: plate 64].

Plate 9: WJ Gordon (after Th Reijgers), Vue de Palais de Buitenzorg (1842) [Source: John Bastin and Bea Brommer (1979) Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia. Spectrum, Utrecht: plate 20].

Plate 10: A Dutchman with his Pot Plants, (Java) [Source: Rob Nieuwenhuys (1998) [First published 1981] Baren en Oudgasten. Querido, Amsterdam: p 169].

Plate 11: Attributed to C van de Koppel, Cleared Land, South (1923) [Source: Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk (2001) Het Indië Boek. Waanders Uitgevers, Zwolle: p 422].

Plate 12: J Jongejans, Devil’s Bridge, West Coast of Sumatra (c 1915) [Source: Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk (2001) Het Indië Boek. Waanders Uitgevers, Zwolle: p 258].

Plate 13: Netherlands Indies Army (Aviation Division), Aerial View of Railroad and Ricefields, Priangan (Java) (c 1935)

ix [Source: Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk (2001) Het Indië Boek. Waanders Uitgevers, Zwolle: p 99].

Chapter 4

Plate 1: Abraham Salm, The Countryside of Citrap [Source: Richard Hamblyn and Yu-Chee Chong (1991) Java. Naar Schilderijen en Tekeningen van A Salm. Gallery Editions, Singapore: p 21].

Plate 2: W van Groenewoud (after FVHA de Stuers), Vue de Magellang (1833) [Source: John Bastin and Bea Brommer (1979) Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia. Spectrum, Utrecht: plate 66].

Plate 3: Willem von Geusau, and the Volcano (Gunung Api) (undated) [Source: Yu-Chee Chong and Richard Hamblyn (199?) [Exact publication date unavailable] Views of Indonesia (1848–1857) by Willem von Geusau (1814–1872). Gallery Editions, Singapore: p 69].

Plate 4: Willem von Geusau, The Sun Gap (undated) [Source: Yu-Chee Chong and Richard Hamblyn (199?) [Exact publication date unavailable] Views of Indonesia (1848–1857) by Willem von Geusau (1814–1872). Gallery Editions, Singapore: p 73].

Plate 5: Jean Demmeni, Ricefields at Singgalang, West Central Sumatra (undated) [Source: Leo Haks and Paul Zach (1987) Indonesia: Images from the Past. Photographs: Jean Demmeni. Times Editions, Singapore: p 72].

Plate 6: Walter Spies, Iseh in the Morning Light (1938) [Source: Hans Rhodius and John Darling (1980) Walter Spies and . Tropical Museum, Amsterdam: p 46].

x

Plate 7: Walter Spies, Water Landscape (1933) [Source: Hans Rhodius and John Darling (1980) Walter Spies and Balinese Art. Tropical Museum, Amsterdam: p 30].

Plate 8: JD van Herwerden, Village near Wonokitri, Tengger Region (Java) (undated) [Source: Leo Haks and Guus Maris (1995) Lexicon of Foreign Artists who Visualised Indonesia (1600–1950). Gert Jan Bestebreurtje, Utrecht: plate C131].

Plate 9: Willem Bleckmann, Ominous Weather (undated) [Source: Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate (1991) Pictures from the Tropics. KIT, Amsterdam: p 87].

Plate 10: Hendrik Paulides, Java (1924) [Source: Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate (1991) Pictures from the Tropics. KIT, Amsterdam: p 108].

Plate 11: Woodbury and Page, Coffee Sorting, (after 1880) [Source: Steve Wachlin (1994) Woodbury & Page, Photographers: Java. KITLV Press, Leiden: p 177].

Chapter 5

Plate 1: , Borobudur (1872) [Source: Gerrit Knaap (1999) Cephas, Yogyakarta: Photography in the Service of the Sultan. KITLV, Leiden: p 103].

Plate 2: HC Cornelius, The Restoration of (1807) [Source: Leo Haks and Guus Maris (1995) Lexicon of Foreign Artists who Visualised Indonesia (1600–1950). Gert Jan Bestebreurtje, Utrecht: plate C50].

xi

Plate 3: Antoine Payen, Candi Sewu, Prambanan (1823–5) [Source: Marie-Odette Scalliet (1995) Antoine Payen: Peintre des Indes Orientales. University of Leiden, Leiden: plate 47].

Plate 4: WOJ Nieuwenkamp, Besakih (Bali) (1937) [Source: Ruud Spruit (1997) Artists on Bali. The Pepin Press, Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur: p 28].

Plate 5: Walter Spies, Landscape (undated) [Source: Ruud Spruit (1997) Artists on Bali. The Pepin Press, Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur: p 70].

Plate 6: Ida Bagus Ketut Diding, The Sorcerer Queen Takes Rangda Form and Causes Death and Moral Dissolution (late 1930s) [Source: Hildred Geertz (1994) Images of Power: Balinese Paintings made for Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu: p 76].

Plate 7: J Hofstede, Mosque, Kuta Raja () (c 1910) [Source: Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk (2001) Het Indië Boek. Waanders Uitgevers, Zwolle: p 239].

Plate 8: L van Leer, Acehnese Fighters Storming Our Troops (1875) [Source: John Bastin and Bea Brommer (1979) Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia. Spectrum, Utrecht: plate 259].

Plate 9: Casualties of the (undated) [Source: Rob Nieuwenhuys (1988) Met Vreemde Ogen. Querido, Amsterdam: p 161].

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Chapter 6

Plate 1: The Holle-Van de Huchts at Home (undated) [Source: Rob Nieuwenhuys (1982) Komen en Blijven. Querido, Amsterdam: p 22].

Plate 2: Walter Spies, Balinese Boys Bathing (undated) [Source: Michael Hitchcock and Lucy Norris (1995) Bali: The Imaginary Museum. The Photographs of Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete. Oxford University Press, Oxford: plate 83].

Plate 3: Unknown, Women Bathing at a River (c 1910) [Source: Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk (2001) Het Indië Boek. Waanders Uitgevers, Zwolle: p 162].

Plate 4: Abraham Salm, The Bathing Spot at Wenditt (undated) [Source: Richard Hamblyn and Yu-Chee Chong (1991) Java. Naar Schilderijen en Tekeningen van A Salm. Gallery Editions, Singapore: p 61].

Plate 5: Adrien Jean le Mayeur de Merprès, Bathing in the Garden (undated) [Source: Ruud Spruit (1997) Artists on Bali. The Pepin Press, Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur: p 103].

Plate 6: Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, The Turkish Bath (1862) [Source: Roger Benjamin (ed) (1997) Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney: p 70].

xiii Introduction

In her book Race and the Education of Desire (1995), Ann Laura Stoler exhorted historians of Southeast Asia to move beyond studies of how Europeans (often erroneously) described indigenous society, and to discuss instead ‘how Europeans imagined themselves in the colonies’.1 Since it is now widely accepted that European views of colonial territories sometimes revealed more about Europeans than they did about the subjects of their artistic and intellectual gaze, it is logical to pursue new inquiries into how Europeans conceptualised themselves within Asia. Indeed, it is fruitless to explore European actions in colonial contexts without understanding their historically specific cultural rationale, particularly when these actions directly affected the lives of , as European alterations of the environment often did. This dissertation represents an analysis of a particular set of attitudes, concerning how Europeans — a foreign ruling class who expatriated themselves to the tropics — located themselves relative to, and formed coherent cultural discourses about, the landscapes of colonial Indonesia (the Netherlands Indies). Colonial views of Indies landscapes, as expressed in visual images and literature, manifested themselves as a far more diverse and complex array of attitudes, deeply embedded in social constructs, than might have been expected. In Dutch art and literature, views of Indies landscapes expressed ideals and anti-ideals, celebrations and anxieties, hopes for the future and musings upon the past, as well as uncertain reflections on the nature of colonial identities.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the landscapes of Indonesia were home to a small, influential group of foreigners who were to transform substantial parts of the archipelago’s environment to suit their own ends. The Dutch had maintained a presence in the region since the late sixteenth century, when they were first drawn to the Indies (as they called this part of the world) for the opportunity to trade in spices. The story that follows —

1 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham and London, 1995): 99.

Introduction

of the foundation of a Dutch sea-borne trading network alongside the Asian and other European networks that already existed, and its evolution into a fully-fledged colonial state — is a well-known one. The natural riches of the Netherlands Indies formed the basis of a long and often exploitative political and economic Dutch association with Indonesia that ultimately ended with the violent expulsion of Dutch colonists from a newly-independent Indonesia in the mid-twentieth century. By that time, many new landscapes had been added to the handful of port cities that formed the first Dutch-controlled territories in the Indies. In the course of colonial expansion through the archipelago, the harbours and coastal settlements that the Dutch were initially familiar with were joined, in the nineteenth century, by the more diverse landscapes that many Indonesians already knew: fertile plains and dense tropical ; highland plateaus and mountainous interiors; volcanoes, winding rivers, and inland lakes.

Each new contact with landscapes and the peoples who inhabited them was integrated into a growing dialogue among Dutch colonists, and between colonists and local Asian inhabitants, about the meaning and value of these environments. Much of this dialogue, or discourse, took place in official Dutch circles, particularly when decisions were made concerning trade, agriculture, and administration, to which end most colonial interactions with and transformations of Indies landscapes were directed. However, a vibrant discourse also formed in non-official circles, in the realm of colonial culture. Dutch colonists painted, drew, wrote about and, from the latter half of the nineteenth century, photographed the landscapes that they settled in, travelled through and, sometimes, altered.

While there is a growing literature on the nature and effects of colonial transformations to the Indonesian environment, particularly in pursuit of agricultural expansion, comparatively little is known of the way in which social and political actions were formulated by Dutch colonists with reference to cultural attitudes to landscape. For instance, at present no connection has been made between Dutch conservation policies in the Netherlands Indies and popular attitudes to deforestation or wilderness, since there has been little historical discussion of the cultural ideals, assumptions and values that underpinned colonial actions in Indies landscapes. This doctoral dissertation represents an effort to begin connecting

2 Introduction

nature to culture, ideology to policy, and aesthetics to practice, in histories of Indonesia.

The artifacts of European culture in the Indies have long attracted the interest of historians keen to reconstruct the experiences and beliefs of colonists and Asians alike. Novels and photographs have been an important component of such studies. In recent years, a large number of anthologies and monographs on Dutch colonial painting have also emerged. At the same time, there has been a burgeoning analytical literature on the cultural contours of colonial society. This has enriched historical insights into the construction of race, gender and class in Asia as well as in Europe. Finally, in recent years, there has been a growing interest, by no means exclusive to Indonesia scholars, in environmental histories, and in the construction of nature. It is my intention here to bring these streams of scholarship together in a study of how a ruling class in pre-independence Indonesia — in this case, Europeans — constructed an identity for themselves, and formed relationships with, Asian landscapes in a colonial context. I draw upon certain artifacts of colonial culture — namely paintings, literature and photographs — and ask how these reveal the historical formation of attitudes toward landscapes, and the negotiation of colonial identities.

My central thesis is that identities and attitudes were formed not only in the social relationships that Europeans had with Asians, but also — and crucially — in the encounters that they had with tropical landscapes. I will demonstrate that colonial aesthetic practices often had their origins in the VOC period, that is, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the first Dutch encounters with Asia occurred. I consider what these attitudes consisted of, what their historical origins were, and whether they bore any relationship to colonial policies. I argue that, in many respects, colonial policies and cultural attitudes diverged, notably in the sphere of conservation, which was a growing official concern in late colonial Indonesia but almost absent from the agenda of Dutch artists and writers. This thesis also considers how attitudes to environment shaped social landscapes. I argue that attitudes to nature and landscape were often enmeshed with prevalent colonial attitudes toward race, gender and class.

This thesis is not, then, a history without people in it: on the contrary, it is an exhortation to

3 Introduction

approach cultural history from a perspective that takes into account the environmental context in which policies and historical identities were formed.

F Landscape in current historiography G

Environmental history

The last two decades or so have seen the emergence of a great deal of research into the environmental and, more generally, Southeast Asia. This research has prompted scholars to revisit aspects of the region’s political, economic and cultural history with renewed vigour, particularly with respect to the long-term effects of European imperialism. The work of Richard Grove has been instrumental in defining this paradigm shift. In Green Imperialism (1995) and its successor, Ecology, Climate and Empire (1997), Grove posited that modern conservation movements had their origins in the tropics rather than in Europe or North America.2 Grove argued that it was the expansion of colonial capitalism during the nineteenth century and the resulting transformation of tropical environments that provoked the first co-ordinated responses to ecological degradation. Conservation policies were not the outcome of petitions from concerned western lobby groups so much as the initiative of colonial governments (with the aid of international scientific institutions) acting in the interests of their own long-term survival, which of course depended upon sustainable levels of resource extraction.3

Europeans had been confronted with the negative effects of environmental exploitation from as early as the seventeenth century,4 when some of their most egregious errors provided lessons on how to better manage future colonies. Hence, the Dutch recklessly

2 Richard H Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995); Richard H Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400–1940 (Cambridge, 1997). 3 Grove (1995): 2, 7, 486; Grove (1997): 37. 4 Grove (1995): 5.

4 Introduction

exploited Mauritius between 1599 and 1655 before ultimately abandoning the island as a wasteland. By the time the Cape colony was founded, however, the Dutch had learned from their mistakes, taking care to manage its environs prudently from the outset. The colonists applied forest conservation measures to the entire hinterland and imposed heavy penalities upon any who dared to thieve from the Company garden, which was carefully maintained for provisional, medicinal and experimental purposes.5 The disastrous island experience of the Dutch, and their subsequent caution in other colonies, was replicated elsewhere by the French and the British.6

By the nineteenth century, when the colonial state began to emerge as a new political entity in the tropics, trading companies and local populations alike were often forced into conflict with governments that prefered to limit exploitation rather than suffer the economic consequences of permanent ecological damage, not to mention the political effects of social discontent.7 Ann Laura Stoler’s work on plantation capitalism in East Sumatra between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represents a specific Indonesian example of how environmental protection was often the inadvertent outcome of the colonial state’s instinct for self-preservation.8 Further, Grove’s observation that government regulation of land use also provided new means for social control9 has been borne out by specific examples from colonial Indonesia. Peter Boomgaard’s 1989 study of changing land use patterns in parts of Java during the nineteenth century demonstrated how Dutch and Chinese efforts to communalise arable lands enhanced their control over labour in addition

5 Grove (1995): 129, 132–3, 135–6, 143. The Dutch colony at (on the southern tip of Africa) was founded in 1652. 6 This has led Grove to posit that islands functioned as miniature testing grounds for colonial exploitation, and therefore played a crucial role in the European formulation of conservation policies — Grove (1995): 9. 7 Grove (1995): 3, 7, 185. 8 Stoler showed that when planters became too greedy in their grab for land on Sumatra’s east coast, it was sometimes in the state’s best interests to intervene in order to prevent unrest among local Asian populations — Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (Ann Arbor, 1995): 15. 9 Grove (1997): 204. Grove found that in British India, for instance, phases of ‘vigorous resistance to colonial forest control’ regularly preceded more serious insurgencies: 206.

5 Introduction

to land.10 Chapters 3 and 4 of this thesis provide additional support for the link between these two sources of power in colonial minds. As will be demonstrated throughout, the Dutch policy of governing to ensure rust en orde (peace and order) extended to colonial views toward the natural environment, and informed a coherent set of aesthetic ideals that became particularly well-developed in European landscape painting.

The extent to which coercive agendas resided in colonial environmental policies has inspired much debate among scholars. For instance, colonial and post-colonial governments in Indonesia have both been criticised for privileging special interests over the needs of indigenous groups in their enforcement of conservation measures. A recent study by Paul Jepson and Robert J Whittaker (2002) represents an attempt to dissociate the actions of Indonesian governments from those of their colonial predeccesors.11 The authors used their review of legislative changes in the final decades of Dutch colonial rule to argue that a certain degree of paternalism among the colonial policy-making elite had been inevitable,12 but that this group had only ever acted altruistically in its endeavour to set aside land for preservation.13

Jepson and Whittaker’s conclusions are surprising, if not dubious, given that a decade earlier two studies had already established that Dutch commercial interests usually governed the development of colonial environmental policy. These studies, one by Nancy Lee Peluso (1991) and the other by Peter Boomgaard (1992), provided the first detailed

10 Peter Boomgaard, Between Sovereign Domain and Servile Tenure: The Development of Rights to Land in Java, 1780–1870 (Amsterdam, 1989): 44–6. 11 Paul Jepson and Robert J Whittaker, ‘Histories of protected areas: Internationalisation of conservationist values and their adoption in the Netherlands Indies (Indonesia)’, Environment and History, 8(2), 2002: 129. 12 Jepson and Whittaker: 130, 132. 13 Jepson and Whittaker: 153. The authors trace the enactment of conservation legislation and the creation of nature reservations on pages 147–51 and 156–9. They take particular issue with Peter Boomgaard’s contention that colonial environmental policies were compatible with the broader imperialist agenda, and were therefore less inspired by civic sentiments than conservation movements in the Netherlands — see Peter Boomgaard, ‘Oriental nature, its friends and its enemies: Conservation of nature in late-colonial Indonesia, 1889–1949’, Environment and History, 5(3), 1999: 271.

6 Introduction

overview of changing practices in forest management on Java between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries.14 The major change that both authors documented was a shift from negotiation and exchange with indigenous rulers during the VOC period to an increasing bureaucratisation of forest management in the colonial period.15 Boomgaard found that the advent of managerialism in the sector could be traced to the end of the VOC period, when the imperative of maximum exploitation was superseded by a commercially motivated endeavour to achieve sustainable yields.16 In his later work, Boomgaard elaborated upon the official distinction (also noted by Peluso) between teak forests that were maintained for commercial purposes, and all other kinds of forest, which were contained under the umbrella term wildhoutbossen (junglewood forests). The latter accounted for the majority of Java’s forested land, but were not subject to legislative protection until 1874.17 Further, wildhoutbossen were only protected in the interests of damage control. The delayed creation of schermbossen (watershed protection forests) in upland areas from 1890 — where all felling was prohibited in order to prevent further soil erosion — provides a pertinent example of this retroactive kind of colonial policy-making. Commodity species like teak, by contrast, were governed by the paradigm of sustainable exploitation from the early nineteenth century.18

These studies of forest management in colonial Java have been useful in detailing the policy outcomes of certain European attitudes toward Indonesian landscapes. Boomgaard’s and Peluso’s obervations on the administrative distinctions between teak and non-teak forests on Java, for instance, describe the result of a general lack of interest in non- commercial landscapes among Dutch colonists that will be discussed often throughout this

14 Nancy Lee Peluso, ‘The history of state forest management in colonial Java’, Forest and Conservation History, 35(2), 1991: 65–75; and Peter Boomgaard, ‘Forest management and exploitation in colonial Java, 1677–1897’, Forest and Conservation History, 36(1), 1992: 4–14. 15 Particularly in Peluso (1991): 65, 68. Both authors chart a brief trend toward deregulation during the British interregnum (1811–16) before a return to greater government involvement upon the reinstatement of Dutch rule — Peluso (1991): 68–9; Boomgaard (1992): 10. 16 Boomgaard (1992): 9, 13. 17 Peluso (1991): 69; Boomgaard (1999): 261. 18 Boomgaard (1999): 262.

7 Introduction

thesis. I shall further demonstrate that colonial painters avoided wildernesses altogether in preference for what might best be described as pastoral scenes, and that novelists expressed a dedicated aversion to jungles and vast tracts of uncultivated land. This distaste for the wilderness survived in much stronger measure in Dutch colonial art and literature than might be suggested by the institutional shift, in the final years of colonial rule, toward protecting wilderness for its own sake.19

Studies of environmental policy alone, then, cannot furnish an accurate view of colonial actions in tropical landscapes. Further, those studies that rely upon ‘top-down’ approaches — emphasising government (or, preceding that, Company) policy, institutional activity, and sources derived from elite-level participants — are necessarily encumbered by distortions. For example, Richard Grove has asserted that colonial scientists who were sympathetic to conservation were often also progressive, even radical, in their political beliefs: some even harboured anti-colonial sentiments.20 In this thesis, I will be presenting evidence to the contrary. In the case of the Netherlands Indies, a close examination of visual and literary sources reveals a distinct conservatism among colonists who tacitly imbued their representations of Indies landscapes with the desire to uphold colonial rule. It is also one of the arguments of this thesis that broader attitudes to tropical landscapes were not always congruent with the aims of government. The views of many colonists, approached through an analysis of their contributions to European culture in the Indies, rarely reflected the interest in conservation that policy-makers pursued. The paintings, drawings, photographs, and novels of Europeans living in the Indies collectively suggest an image of a people whose ideas about Indies landscapes and their place within them were formulated upon an entirely different set of concerns.

The most significant limitation of institutional environmental histories, then, is that they have barely addressed the formation of cultural attitudes to tropical nature. This has created

19 Peter Boomgaard traced this policy shift in ‘Oriental nature’ (1999): 274. 20 In Ecology, Climate and Empire, Grove gave the example of late eighteenth century theorists on environmental degradation in French Mauritius who were linked to anti-slavery and anti-colonialist ideologies — Grove (1997): 43. See also Grove (1995): 482–3.

8 Introduction

a bias toward describing the outcomes of European initiatives in Indonesian landscapes, while leaving the causes of colonial behaviours unaccounted for. It is my contention that an investigation of colonial activities in the sphere of art and culture yields fresh insights into the nature of European modes of thinking about the tropical landscapes that surrounded them. Many of my source materials necessarily derive from Java, since most Dutch encounters with the Indonesian archipelago began there. I share this prejudice with the environmental historians cited above, whose institutional focus has led them to the island where the apparatus of the Dutch colonial adminstration was most concentrated, and where official source materials were consequently easiest to procure. Our understanding of other Indonesian environmental histories, where the presence of the colonial state was not so ubiquitous, is therefore limited. An additional aim of my own work has therefore been to balance the current understanding of colonial actions in Indies landscapes with extensive discussions of sources from outside Java, mainly , Sumatra, and Bali. My research on Dutch cultural attitudes toward Indies landscapes is intended to complement existing studies of indigenous beliefs and practices. Once again, the work of Peter Boomgaard has set a pioneering example in this field.21

Studies of colonial art and literature

This dissertation is of course not the first to treat colonial paintings, photographs and literature as useful sources. Quite the contrary: historians of Indonesia have long demonstrated a sophisticated appreciation of the valuable information contained in such materials. The literary works of Europeans who lived and worked in the Netherlands Indies have proven to be a valuable reference point for Indonesia scholars. The peculiarly direct, experiential quality of Dutch colonial novels have made them a popular source for a surprisingly ecclectic array of historians.22 EM Beekman, together with Rob

21 Some of his observations have been cited in Chapter 1, where I discuss historical Indonesian attitudes to landscape. 22 Quite a diverse group of historians have used Dutch colonial novels to illuminate their arguments, or as the subject of studies in their own right. In the first category, see Ann Laura Stoler, who referred to the novels of

9 Introduction

Nieuwenhuys,23 has been perhaps the most prolific historian of Dutch colonial literature, and an avid promoter of its translation into English so that it may be read alongside its better-known French and British counterparts. Beekman has also been among the first to evaluate Dutch literary representations of Indies nature.24 Some of the novels I discuss here — such as Couperus’ The Hidden Force (1900) — are well represented in the specialist literature. However, in Chapter 7 I argue that historians have thus far overlooked the way in which such novels treated the construction of colonial identities in relation to Indies landscapes, particularly with regard to the deep insecurities that underpinned the status of the Dutch as foreigners and ‘outsiders’ in tropical landscapes.

This thesis also contributes to the burgeoning literature on Dutch painting from the Indies. Since the work of J De Loos-Haaxman,25 which was first published in the early 1940s, a

Madelon Lulofs in her Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (Ann Arbor MI, 1995): 33; and more recently, Adrian Vickers, who used ’ The Hidden Force (1900) in his A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge, 2005): 15, 29, 31. In the second category, see the works of EM Beekman and Rob Nieuwenhuys, as well as Tineke Hellwig’s Adjustment and Discontent: Representations of Women in the (Ontario, 1994); Lily Clerkx and Wim Wertheim’s Living in Deli: Its Society as Imagined in Colonial Fiction (Amsterdam, 1991); Jean Gelman Taylor, ‘The inner life of late colonial society’ in The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison WI, 1983), and ‘Nyai Dasima: Portrait of a mistress in literature and film’ in Laurie J Sears (ed) Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia (Durham and London, 1996); Tessel Pollmann, ‘Bruidstraantjes: De koloniale roman, de njai en de apartheid’, Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis, (7), (1986). 23 Rob Nieuwenhuys produced one of the best known overviews of Dutch colonial literature, published in the Netherlands in 1972 and translated into English in 1982 as Mirror of the Indies: A History of Dutch Colonial Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst). 24 See EM Beekman, ‘Junghuhn’s perception of Javanese nature’, Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies, 17(1–2), 1996: 135–45; his ‘Introduction: Rumphius’ life and work’ in the English translation of The Curiosity Cabinet by Georgius Everhardus Rumphius (New Haven and London, 1994); and the more general comments Beekman has made in his analytical anthologies of Dutch colonial literature, particularly Fugitive Dreams: An Anthology of Dutch Colonial Literature (Amherst, 1988) and Troubled Pleasures: Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies, 1600–1950 (Oxford, 1996). 25 J De Loos-Haaxman, Verlaat Rapport Indië: Drie Eeuwen Westerse Schilders, Tekenaars, Grafici, Zilversmeden en Kunstnijveren in Nederlands-Indië (s’-Gravenhage, 1968); De Landsverzameling

10 Introduction

growing number of illustrated anthologies have emerged that provide an overview of European artists in the tropics.26 However, with a few exceptions (such as the recent spate of articles that appeared in the French journal Archipel (2005)),27 most of the scholarly work on colonial painting to date has been largely descriptive, concerned with reconstructing the biographies of colonial artists and ascertaining the provenance of particular works. Very few studies have problematised the themes of Dutch colonial art from the Indies, much less looked to landscape painting as a source of information on cultural attitudes and colonial mentalities. This oversight can partly be attributed to the low regard with which much Dutch colonial painting is held by art scholars who, though kept busy with documenting the prolific amount of colonial paintings, routinely lament the mediocre technical skills of those same artists and the clichéd themes that they pursued.28 It is my intention to cast a more critical eye over some of the landscape paintings of nineteenth and early twentieth century artists with a view to understanding the deeper cultural discourses that animated the construction of these images.

I adopt a similar aim with respect to colonial photographs of Indies landscapes. There has

Schilderijen in Batavia: Landsvoogdsportretten en Compagnieschilders (Leiden, 1941); and Dagwerk in Indië: Hommage aan een Verstild Verleden (Franeker, 1971). 26 See the following, which is by no means a comprehensive list: Kees Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia 1600–1950 (Amsterdam, 2002); Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics (Amsterdam, 1999); Ruud Spruit, Artists on Bali (Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur, 1997); Ruud Spruit, Indonesian Impressions: Oriental Themes in Western Painting (Wijk and Aalburg, 1992). 27 See particularly the articles by Werner Kraus, ‘’s interpretation of the Arrest of : an example of Indonesian “proto-nationalist” modernism’, Archipel 69, 2005: 259–94; and ‘Chinese influence on early modern Indonesian art? Hon Qua: a Chinese painter in 19th century Java’, Archipel 69, 2005: 61–86. See also Matthew Isaac Cohen, ‘Traditional and popular painting in modern Java’, Archipel 69, 2005: 5–38. 28 This attitude is particularly apparent in the work of Marie-Odette Scalliet, who has conducted extensive biographical research on several Dutch colonial artists. See Scalliet’s ‘Javaanse taferelen: Een aanwist van de Oosterse collecties’, Bulletin van Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden en het Scaliger Instituut, 2, 2003: 4, where she concludes that the drawings of Christoffel de Wilde (1784–1860) are of cultural and historical significance, but of little artistic value. In Pictures from the Tropics (1999): 89, Scalliet concludes that in the context of European nineteenth century painting, Dutch efforts in the Indies were ‘average’, even if they were quite good by colonial standards.

11 Introduction

been popular and scholarly interest in images of the Indies since the early twentieth century, as evident in the works of F de Haan, published in 1912 and 1923 respectively.29 In later decades, other scholars (usually Dutch) added to the growing repertory of works on European images of the Netherlands Indies, notably J de Loos-Haaxman (1940s and 1970s), mentioned above,30 and the prolific Rob Nieuwenhuys (1960s-1980s).31 In more recent years, several creative approaches to Indonesian histories have appeared in the form of photographic anthologies, among them Scott Merrillee’s fascinating retrospective of Batavia,32 Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk’s encyclopedic snapshots of the Indies,33 and an early twentieth century view of Indies cities from the air.34 Many of the images contained in these and other works demonstrate the broad interests of colonial photographers, and the problems that are therefore associated with defining their intentions. Because of photography’s diverse applications, it is sometimes difficult to categorise the images made by photographers: do they, for instance, belong to the realm of art or science? Indeed, for decades after the invention of photographic processes in the mid-nineteenth century, photographs were received as perfect duplicates of reality, rather than as compositions, constructs or experiments.35 From its inception, photography was recognised

29 F de Haan, Priangan, de Preanger-Regentschappen onder het Nederlandsch Bestuur tot 1811 (Priangan, the Preanger Regencies under the Dutch Administration up to 1811) (Batavia, 1912); and Oud Batavia: Gedenkboek Uitgeven door het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen naar Aanleiding van het Driehonderdjaring Bestaan der Stad in 1919 (Old Batavia: Memorial Book Distributed by the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences, on the Occasion of the Three Hundred Year Anniversary of the City in 1919) (Batavia, 1923). 30 For later work, see J Terwen-De Loos, Nederlandse Schilders en Tekenaars in de Oost, 17de–20ste Eeuw (Amsterdam, 1972). 31 See Rob Nieuwenhuys’ Tempo Doeloe series, published by Querido (Amsterdam) — Tempo Doeloe (1961), Baren en Oudgasten (1981, re-issued in 1998), Komen en Blijven (1982), and Met Vreemde Ogen (1988). See the Bibliography for a more comprehensive list of works. 32 Scott Merrillees, Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs (Surrey, 2000). 33 Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk, Het Indië Boek (Zwolle, 2001). 34 JR van Diessen and RPGA Voskuil, Boven Indië: Nederlands-Indië en Nieuw Guinea in Luchtfotos, 1921-1963 (Purmerend, 1993). 35 Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock, Landscape as Photograph (New Haven and London, 1985): 41; Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities (London and New York, 2000): 11.

12 Introduction

as an invaluable empirical tool. It was employed in the aid of science, and in the founding of new western scholarly disciplines during the late nineteenth century, notably anthropology and ethnography. Interestingly, the modern relevance of these disciplines has recently been questioned because of their historical connection with colonial scholarship and photography.36 Tourism also has its origins in the imperial age, and souvenir photographs became an important commodity in the early tourist market.37

There was something highly specialised, technical, even elitist, about early photography, but by the late nineteenth century, when hand-held cameras became available, photography became more accessible, popular, even ordinary, because it favoured the amateur and appeared to require limited artistry.38 I include photographs in this study not because I wish to argue that they were created and received as art, but because they were such an important component of colonial culture, both in its claims to propapate progress and empiricism in colonised lands, and in the new forms of entertainment that novel landscapes and experiences afforded travelling Europeans.

My primary research materials, then, consist mainly of visual sources — paintings, drawings and photographs —with occasional supporting references to colonial literature. In choosing visual materials as my main primary sources I have had a wealth of recently published materials to draw upon for images: anthologies and exhibition catalogues, illustrated art histories and monographs, even online sources, such as the excellent image archive of the Koninklijk Instituut Voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV). Many of these are mentioned above and listed in the Bibliography. I also gained access to several archival collections, among them the electronic catalogue of the Museum Nusantara in

36 Edward Said articulated deep misgivings about the historical assumptions upon which these disciplines were based in his Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993). Another work to analyse the colonial assocations between anthroplogy and photography is Elizabeth Edwards (ed), Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920 (New Haven and London, 1992). 37 See Leo Haks and Steve Wachlin, Indonesia: 500 Early Postcards (Singapore, 2004): 24; Rainer Fabian and Hans-Christian Adam, Masters of Early Travel Photography (London, 1983): 338; Susan Sontag, On Photography (London, 1977): 3, 9, 42; HJ de Graaf, Ambon in Oude Ansichten (Zaltbommel, 1972): 16, 20. 38 Sontag: 21, 24.

13 Introduction

Delft, and the photograph albums held by the Fotobureau at the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT). Finally, I had the opportunity to visit several Dutch and Indonesian museums to observe what kinds of images are currently selected by curators and how these are displayed to the public. This manner of research was particularly important to my thesis, not least because travel to the Netherlands and Indonesia afforded a necessary sight of the contrast (contemporary rather than historical) between Dutch and Indonesian landscapes. Further, anyone who enjoys looking at art has felt the occasional shock of seeing a painting, textile or object in situ as opposed to on the page of an exhibition catalogue or art book. Often the texture, colour, size and general presence of an object alters dramatically in this translation from three-dimensional space to two-dimensional surface. I felt it was important to see as much of the art that I was writing about in real life as possible, and I was not disappointed. Indonesian textiles are infinitely more beautiful when their hand made textures can be appreciated in proximity. Landscape paintings become more vivid when the brush strokes are visible and the thickness of paint is discernible. I was surprised at how luridly bright, for example, the paintings of Adrien le Mayeur were as they hung in their house-museum at Sanur on Bali. Reproductions in books, on the other hand, have sometimes reduced their palette almost to pastels.

In Indonesia the Balinese museums, in keeping with the island’s unique relationship with the west, had the largest collection of colonial art (not to mention an impressive collection of Indonesian art). During a short research trip to Bali and Java in 2005 I visited the Museum Puri Lukisan, the Neka Museum and the Agung Raya Museum, all in Ubud where most European artists had been concentrated in the 1920s and 1930s. On Java I visited several museums, including the National Museum. Not surprisingly, perhaps, most were all but silent on colonial art. More illuminating was my journey to several famous landscapes that had captivated Dutch painters and photographers during the colonial period, among them the Botanic Garden at and the temples of Borobudur and Prambanan in . Sadly, security concerns in Aceh and continuing instability in Maluku circumscribed my ability to conduct fieldwork more broadly across Indonesia. I was therefore unable to visit Ambon or Sumatra, two important sources of colonial interest in historical and frontier landscapes respectively, both focal points of my research.

14 Introduction

In 2004 I spent a rewarding research month in the Netherlands. At the Mauritshuis, and the Zuiderzeemuseum, Enkhuizen I viewed local landscapes in Dutch painting, particularly from the seventeenth century, which had such a strong influence on later Dutch and European art. It was at the KIT Fotobureau in Amsterdam that I was first struck by how many photo albums had been arranged in a narrative structure that paralleled the physical journey of Dutch people through the Indies. At the Museum Nusantara in Delft, whose collection is derived from the former academy for colonial civil servants, I first saw electronic copies of the works of anonymous or less well known Indonesian artists who had taken up a European-style interest in landscape painting. At the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden, I was surprised to find that its fame as a treasure house of Dutch colonial art is restricted in practice to its storage facility. In keeping with its brief as an ethnographic museum, it houses an excellent collection of indigenous Southeast Asian arts, as does the Wereldmuseum in . The Leiden museum’s public silence on its colonial holdings, except for special exhibitions, forms a contrast to the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, which houses an exceptional permanent collection on the Netherlands Indies. Many different kinds of media are represented, from painting, to film, to objects from curiosity cabinets, to wax effigies of characters from colonial novels. Unfortunately the Rijksmuseum was undergoing renovations during my visit and only a selection of its colonial collection was therefore on display. It was interesting, however, that the museum chose to exhibit only its seventeenth century works, in keeping with its ‘golden age’ focus. In its restricted capacity to exhibit the museum projected an odd impression that Dutch overseas expansion ended around 1800. On the whole, however, museums in the Netherlands were noteworthy for their open, often nuanced and critical portrayal of the colonial era, as well as for their exquisite collection of Indonesian art and artifacts.

The strong focus on Southeast Asian art and history in Australia has afforded me access to important collections here (notably, none of them of colonial art). The Australian National Museum in Canberra has arguably one of the finest collections of Southeast Asian textiles in the world. These proved useful for my research on nature and landscape in Indonesian

15 Introduction

art, as did the museum’s temporary exhibition on Southeast Asian and the permanent Asia collection in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

These observations on sources and methodology have combined to remind me that those images which I used as a primary resource, treated as an archive, ‘read’ as texts, and used to trace intertextualities over time were initially made and received as objects with a life of their own outside a museum: in a folio, on a parlour wall, as a temple hanging or an article of clothing, as a government record, as a photograph in a family album.

In assuming a new life as objects of discussion in a thesis on aspects of Dutch colonial culture, a further transformation of these sources was therefore necessary: they had to be reduced and made sense of. The vastness and variety of images that published and museum sources yielded required me to be selective in the samples that I discuss at length here. To begin whittling down a manageable sample I chose to revisit the work of image-makers who have become well known among historians of Dutch colonial art: figures like Abraham Salm, Jan Poortenaar, Rudolph Bonnet, and Walter Spies to name only a few. As I elaborate upon elsewhere in this Introduction, up until very recently most of the scholarly work on these artists has focused on constructing biographies, clarifying attributions and publishing selected works — a descriptive project, then, to which a more analytical approach to the content and historical context of these works, as intended here, might be a timely contribution.

The themes that form the basis of discussion in the body of this dissertation were formed on consideration of recurring images and the collected works of certain artists that lent themselves well to interpretation, comparison and analysis, perhaps because they were created from the outset with deeper motives in mind than taking a likeness of a view. However, I have discarded more than I saw fit to use. Some pictures of sawah landscapes or mountain valleys were just that, no more and no less. It would be disingenuous to claim that each and every European representation of nature or landscape contributed equally to a discourse on Dutch colonialism in the tropics. Large samples of visual images — particularly colonial photographs, which have survived in mind-boggling profusion —

16 Introduction

sometimes elude systematic historical analysis, and cannot be made to conform to a notion of a unified discourse where they are self evidently more indicative of disorder and fragmentation.39

The difficulty and frequent inappropriateness of enforcing order upon sources from an historical distance was again encountered when it comes to deciding upon which artists should be included in a study of Dutch colonial painting. Walter Spies and Adrien le Mayeur were not Dutch, but German and Belgian respectively, and yet I have discussed their work at length because it forms a larger body of European painting from the Indies which was known to a Dutch audience, and because in the case of Spies (if not Le Mayeur), many European painters in the Indies often worked together and were aware of one another’s endeavours. Other scholars in the field have adopted a similarly flexible approach to what constituted colonial nationality.

For the handful of novels that I chose to discuss, the list was potentially enormous, and as with my visual sources limits were necessary. I might have left literature out all together perhaps, but I felt I could not be silent on novels since they comprise such a rich historical source on Dutch colonial culture and are the subject of much erudite scholarship. As with my visual sources, I intended to revisit well known novels with a new focus on Dutch constructions of nature and landscape, and so I chose those novels that were most widely read, within and beyond the Netherlands. That meant identifying those that had been translated into English. I have, however, consulted the Dutch versions and made my own translations throughout — an important process, since many English translations are inaccurate and rather liberal with their tendency to omit large sections of the Dutch original. Except for Chapter 7, where I make a detailed case study of three particularly well-known Dutch novels in order to unite the thematic threads of my thesis, I use novels as

39 See a recent and fascinating analysis of a crimonological photograph collection by Alejandra Bronfman, ‘The Allure of technology: Photographs, statistics amd the elusive female criminal in 1930s Cuba’, Gender and History, 19(1), 2007: 60–77. Bronfman’s discussion highlights the failure of historical ‘scientific’ procedures to categorise and diagnose female criminality, but her analysis could equally be applied to contemporary scholars mining colonial archives.

17 Introduction

supporting texts to provide contrast to or comment on visual sources. Famous writers on Indies nature like Rumphius and Junghuhn are passed over briefly, since their contribution was more clearly to science than to art, and that represents a focus that falls beyond the scope of the present work.

F Artists, Audiences and Patrons G

Before I proceed further, it is perhaps necessary for me to define more exactly whose culture this survey of colonial art and literature represents. At first glance, the sources I refer to seem gleaned from disparate sources. The paintings, photographs and novels that will be discussed throughout this thesis were produced by people who sometimes lived a century apart, and on different islands of the Indonesian archipelago. However, many of these European artists and writers shared several important experiences in common.

I would like to term the first group of these Europeans as ‘career’ or ‘professional’ colonists. These were long-term residents of the Indies, many (but certainly not all) of them Indies-born descendents of old colonial families that had been established from an early male settler in the eighteenth or even seventeenth century. Many of them gained their livelihood, directly or indirectly, through the operations of the Dutch colonial state. Most of the painters, photographers and novelists whose works I consult — particularly from the period before 1870, when emigration to the Indies was finally deregulated — were only part-time artists and writers. The vast majority of their working lives in the Indies were spent fulfilling their duties as planters, administrators, traders, or servicemen in the colonial army or navy. Before 1870, there were few idle observers of colonial life in the Netherlands Indies. It was very difficult to gain entry to colonies unless one received permission from the Governor-General’s office. Authority to live and work in the Indies was usually granted on the basis that one could produce good character references from people already stationed in the Indies, and prove an ability to financially support oneself — that is, gain productive employment in a sector deemed respectable for Europeans to work in.40 The social

40 Scalliet’s description of the permits that the artist HN Sieburgh had to acquire in order to travel to the Indies is useful in illuminating this point — Scalliet (1999): 68.

18 Introduction

experiences of Europeans who lived and worked in the Indies under these conditions, like their political and economic experiences, were those of an elite who gained their prestige through imperial conquest and consolidation, and who, increasingly, maintained their status in the nineteenth century through reference to their ‘European-ness’, or race.

The career colonist was a staple feature of Netherlands Indies society until the very end of the colonial period. After 1870, when more Europeans (particularly women) flocked to the Indies to pursue career (or marriage) opportunities, the aspirations of this group as a whole changed considerably. Europeans living in the Indies became more conscious of themselves as a racial group apart from ‘natives’, a process that had its origins in the early nineteenth century. Jean Gelman Taylor’s work has elucidated how, before the British interregnum (1811–16), social and cultural life among Europeans in the Indies was more often influenced by Southeast Asian norms, since Dutch men integrated into local communities by marriage with indigenous or Indo-European women. The British disapproved of this intermingling and, after 1816, the Dutch continued to differentiate themselves from Asians in the manner of their British predecessors.41

With improvements to international transport and communications in the late nineteenth century, it became easier for Dutch people living in the Indies to maintain strong ties with Europe.42 Even so, for Dutch women (and children) in the Indies, the separateness of European from Asian was sometimes ambiguous. European households were usually maintained by Asian servants, and children were reared by live-in Asian nannies. Further, the wives and children of European men were often Asian, or Eurasian, and so one’s ‘European’ acquaintances were often of an eclectic composition.43 The difficulties of maintaining racial distinctness in these circumstances were a major concern of late colonial policy-makers.44 As we shall see in Chapter 7, the work of women writers (which

41 Taylor (1983): 115. 42 Taylor (1983): 128–30. 43 Taylor (1983): 16–17, 45, 168. This was particularly true of VOC-era society, and still a strong feature of nineteenth century Indies society. 44 See the works of Ann Laura Stoler and Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, listed in the Bibliography, on this subject.

19 Introduction

proliferated from the late nineteenth century) is particularly enlightening on the ambiguities of hybrid colonial identities.

Improvements to infrastructure and the liberalisation of colonial immigration policy in the late nineteenth century also saw the emergence of a second, more transient group of Europeans in the Indies. The late colonial period coincided with the emergence of modern tourism, and for Dutch artists in search of exotic inspiration the Netherlands Indies were a natural destination. Indeed, from the late nineteenth century, the Indies were increasingly viewed as an extension of the Netherlands: tourist posters and brochures sometimes advertised trips to the ‘tropical Netherlands’.45 The new opportunities furnished by faster, cheaper sea travel in the early twentieth century no doubt inspired many of those Europeans who had already acquired a familiarity with the Indies through print to depart for the tropics. Illustrated books and journals of Dutch travellers’ experiences in the Indies had been published in the Netherlands since the seventeenth century. The nineteenth century saw a veritable explosion of such publications, many of them including high quality illustrations46 and, by the second half of the nineteenth century, photographs.

A rich heritage of Dutch publications on the Indies created an aesthetic culture based on intertextualities,47 whereby one observer’s musings provided the basis for another’s motivation to travel, as well as the foundation for his or her subsequent observations of the Indies. Indeed, by the early twentieth century a growing number of Dutch and other European artists, often galvanised by one another’s journeys, incorporated a tour of the

45 See, for example, the tourist poster designed by Hendrik Paulides entitled ‘Leert Tropisch Nederland Kennen’ (Get to Know the Tropical Netherlands), shown in Leo Haks and Guus Maris, Lexicon of Foreign Artists Who Visualised Indonesia (1600-–1950) (Utrecht, 1995): plate C 311. 46 See John Bastin and Bea Brommer, Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia (Utrecht, 1979). 47 See Said, Orientalism: 20, 72, 93, 176. This work is still useful for explaining how colonial European scholarship and literature alike were systems ‘for citing works and authors’, although it is important to note that Said did not use the term ‘intertextuality’. In Culture and Imperialism: 59–60, Said suggested that scholars employ the technique of ‘contrapuntal reading’ in order to deconstruct the discourses of colonialism, a methodology that has been applied widely by post-colonial scholars.

20 Introduction

Indies — with Bali an especially popular destination — as part of a world trip that took in other ‘oriental’ sites in East and South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. For Dutch artists like Isaac Israels and Jan Poortenaar, passing through the Indies provided the means to acquire new material for their work. The same aim had motivated the artists and intellectuals who spent long periods on Bali when they first set out from Europe.

Although Europeans artists had been drawn to the Indies since the seventeenth century, it was not until the late nineteenth century that larger numbers journeyed to the Indies with the express purpose of painting or writing about what they saw, rather than making their living from commerce or government. However, this new group of travelling artists still shared certain things in common with professional colonists. Artists on tour to the Indies did not apply to sovereign Asian rulers for permission to travel, but paid their dues to colonial authorities, among whom they were regarded as (perhaps eccentric) equals:48 entitled, by virtue of their race, to the same privileges as the colonial ruling class. These travelling artists consumed the exotic splendour of the Indies in the relative luxury afforded by their association with the ruling class (which did often include indigenous officials); they accordingly produced images of the Indies as a tropical idyll. The privilege of travel was accorded to these artists by virtue of the Indies’ status as a Dutch colony.

A theme that persists throughout this thesis is that the kinds of images of Indies landscapes that European artists and writers produced were differentiated by medium. The image- makers who produced the most consistent type of work, across the Indies and also for the duration of the colonial period, were painters. Thematically and stylistically, Europeans painters in the Indies produced a remarkably cohesive body of work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, individual differences in talent and technique aside. Whether they were working in 1824 or 1924, European painters in the Indies were frequently given to idealise colonial landscapes. With few exceptions, most Indies painters avoided ugliness and controversy in their work, preferring instead images of exotic beauty and tranquil prosperity. Further, European painters routinely erased overt traces of the ruling class that they belonged to from Indies landscapes, even if their presence was implicit in the

48 Although, as will be seen in Chapter 1, some European artists did attract Asian patrons. 21 Introduction

authoritative perspectives that they adopted. The result was that the typical Indies landscape painting, produced some time between 1820 and 1940, usually contained the same ingredients — palm trees, a smoking volcano, wooden huts — and omitted signs of colonial influence like factories and plantations.49

What was it about colonial painters, and the medium of painting, that encouraged these particular views of Indies landscapes? Many Indies artists were dilettantes, working for their own pleasure and perhaps that of their acquaintances, for there was no art market to speak of in the Indies, and few institutions that encouraged painting.50 The Batavian Society of the Arts and Sciences (Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen), founded in 1778, was oriented toward the science end of the spectrum. It was not until the early twentieth century that kunstkringen (art circles), composed of mainly European enthusiasts, began to emerge in large colonial cities.51 The absence of an art market in the Indies is explained by the fact, alluded to above, that most colonists had to prove themselves capable of a ‘practical’ profession before they could gain passage to the Indies. Europeans who happened to have an inclination toward painting, then, were usually employed in full-time occupations like planting, administration, trade, or in military professions. All these groups maintained a vested interest in peaceful, prosperous landscapes that responded favourably to the demands of the colonial economy and the expanding colonial state, and therefore kept these Europeans in employment.

Far removed from Europe and its modern art trends and, as we shall see, detached from too close an involvement with indigenous arts and culture, the average colonist with a desire to paint belonged to a relatively insular society. Many painters knew one another, often because they shared the same profession and discovered a common interest in art, and of course, because they were part of a European minority in a much larger indigenous

49 Exceptions are discussed in Chapter 4. 50 Scalliet (1999): 856. 51 Koos van Brakel, ‘“For Evidently, the Fine Arts do not Thrive in the Indies”: The artistic climate in the Dutch East Indies in the first half of the twentieth century’ in Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics (Amsterdam, 1999): 103.

22 Introduction

population. Those who found some measure of success in the Netherlands and Europe created images that satisfied western expectations of what tropical landscapes ought to look like. These sorts of paintings usually followed a conservative picturesque or romantic style that was easy for untrained amateurs to acquire because there were sundry historical examples to copy, including Dutch seventeenth century landscapes. Those who pursued more radical styles of painting that kept up with contemporary developments in European art found little favour in the Indies and at the international colonial exhibitions that often displayed landscape art.52

Photographers produced a far less consistent body of images of the Indies than their painterly counterparts, and also attracted more diverse patronage. These two factors together complicate any analysis of the role of photography in colonial culture. In its early applications during the 1840s, and throughout the colonial period, photographers functioned in the Indies in similar ways to early draughtsmen: as specialised, technically- trained adjuncts to scholarly, scientific and military expeditions. The first use for photography in the Indies, in fact, was in association with an archaeological project.53 Colonial government and business were particularly cognizant of the potential application of photography to surveillance and reportage. Plantation companies often employed photographers to document the development of their estates, or to celebrate the completion of a new road or bridge connecting the plantation to existing infrastructure. These photographers, though not producing for wide audiences, represented the contemporary landscapes of the Indies in ways that painters did not, as we shall see in Chapter 3. Perhaps because photography itself was the outcome of technological innovation, the camera was deemed an appropriate tool to capture the modern landscapes of the Indies. Where painters tended to focus exclusively on tranquil idylls and images of stasis, some photographers recorded the changes that colonial rule had wrought upon Indies landscapes, such as large-

52 The reception of Pieter Ouborg’s work, discussed by Leonie ten Duis and Annelies Haase in Ouborg: Schilder (Amsterdam, 1990), is a case in point. 53 The first scientific application of photography in the Indies was for an archeological expedition in 1840, commissioned by the Minister for the Colonies, and undertaken in Central Java — Anneke Groeneveld, ‘Photography in aid of science’ in Toekang Portret: 100 Years of Photography in the Dutch East Indies 1839-1939 (Amsterdam, 1989): 16.

23 Introduction

scale commercial plantations, processing plants and other modern infrastructure.

These sorts of images of Indies landscapes were implicit in the triumphant, positivist discourses that supported colonial exploitation and expansion. However, photography also assumed a wider significance in the culture of Europeans in the Indies, who used it to construct complex narratives about their place within colonial landscapes. This aspect of colonial culture was memorialised in souvenir photographs of the Indies: in familiar panoramas of the countryside taken from the verandahs of colonial hotels; in streetscapes of grand boulevards in colonial cities; and in snapshots of famous wonders like Borobudur, the complex in Central Java. These were images of landscapes that were meant, from the beginning, to be remembered, and therefore their subjects were carefully chosen to reflect the exoticism of the Indies, or else scenes from the daily lives of colonists. Problematic landscapes — jungles, lands subject to slash-and-burn cultivation, and new plantations — remained the province of colonial authorities who sought to improve these environments. These were the kinds of photographs that celebrated colonial enterprise and projected its successes onto an ideal future.

Souvenir photographs functioned as mementos for colonists to flaunt as proof of their adventures, and also fostered a sense of nostalgia that was increasingly relevant to the transient experience of late nineteenth century Europeans in the Indies. Unlike the colonists of previous generations, who expected to serve long (even life-time) tenures in the tropics because of the expense, danger and duration of the journey to the Indies, late-nineteenth century colonists enjoyed cheaper, faster travel and more frequent communication with Europe, and therefore behaved like expatriates rather than settlers.54 Europeans living in this period were acutely conscious of the need to capture and collect their experiences for posterity, hence the popularity of photo albums. These could be assembled from images purchased in the studios that flourished throughout the major cities of the Indies55 or, after

54 The recent work of Rudolph Mrázek supports this interpretation of late-colonial culture in the Indies. See Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton and Oxford, 2002). 55 See the extensive list of photographic studios in the Netherlands Indies in Toekang Portret: 100 Years of Photography in the Dutch East Indies 1839–1939 (Amsterdam, 1989).

24 Introduction

the hand-held camera became available in the early twentieth century, populated with one’s own photographs. As I shall demonstrate in Chapter 2, many of these albums adopted a loose narrative structure imitating a journey from Europe to and through the Indies, which could be re-experienced simply by flicking through the album pages. Published albums produced by professional photographers for Dutch audiences also sometimes adopted this structure.

In many ways it was novelists who provided the richest and most complex views of Indies landscapes. The vast majority of Dutch colonial literature has a distinctly autobiographical character.56 This, combined with the finite duration of Dutch colonialism, provides the contemporary reader with a deep impression of authors who were engaging with their own time and place. Indonesian landscapes permeate most Dutch colonial novels in some form or other. Often writers celebrated the beauty of the tropics. However, colonial literature also provides compelling insights into Dutch attitudes toward the landscapes that painters omitted and photographers only occasionally captured, such as vast wildernesses and thick jungles, as well as the ugly transformations that colonial development sometimes wrought.

Why did colonial writers venture where painters and photographers often would not? Scholars have noted that, as a group, Dutch novelists in the Indies frequently felt themselves to be on the margins of colonial society, for various reasons.57 Oral story-telling abilities were highly valued in the Indies, cultivated on verandahs during the afternoon siesta.58 Reading, on the other hand, was not so popular in the Indies. It has been argued that this was because perishable paper goods were difficult to maintain in the tropics, and because many of the Europeans who ventured to the Indies in the first place had but one purpose in mind: to make money and advance their careers. That the average Dutch colonist was rarely inclined toward intellectual pursuits was certainly a common observation among those who took to writing. Artists and novelists in the Indies often criticised the materialism and parochialism of colonial society, and lamented the absence of

56 Rob Nieuwenhuys and EM Beekman have both commented on this in their work. 57 See Chapter 7 of this thesis. 58 Nieuwenhuys (1982): xxvii.

25 Introduction

an outlet for those who were not enamoured of the entertainments afforded by the local European Club.59 Many novelists were renowned for their ascerbic reflections on these aspects of life in the Indies.

It was perhaps the bookishness, then, and the acutely observant nature of Dutch novelists in the Indies that set them apart from colonial society, and yet also equipped them to write so astutely about it. Colonial writers were frank, biased, blind and inflammatory, ambivalent about colonialism and, often, about colonists. As a result, they often bore the brunt of public condemnation, which perhaps explains why their readership in the Indies was relatively limited. Their audiences were small and cosmopolitan, scattered throughout the Netherlands, Europe and America. Those who managed to gain immediate fame usually found it in the form of notoriety. The most renowned example was Multatuli (aka Eduard Douwes Dekker), author of Max Havelaar, arguably the most famous of Dutch colonial novels. Upon its publication, Dekker’s novel aroused great controversy over its critique of government corruption. The book arguably contributed to the shift toward an ‘ethical’ policy of colonial governance in later decades.60 Dekker was typical of other writers who galvanised public debate in that, while he was determined to criticise colonialism, he was ultimately incapable of rejecting it altogether. The influence that such novels had on future generations of colonists, not to mention other writers, meant that their effects were often far greater than their initial readership attested to.

Clearly, the paintings, photographs and novels that I use as primary sources throughout this thesis do not strictly occupy the realm of popular culture. However, most Europeans in the Indies would have been familiar with at least some of them. Many were actively engaged in their production or consumption. Further, colonial paintings, photographs and literature in

59 The painter Pieter Ouborg complained in a letter in 1925 of ‘the absence of idealisim and thinking, of dreaming away silently to oneself’ in colonial society in the Indies — Ten Duis and Haase: 12. PA Daum, in his Ups and Downs of Life in the Indies (first published 1890), similarly portrayed the mind-numbing effects on a European planter of a life of long, dull spells interspersed by grand parties that ultimately results in his suicide. Similarly, in her 1930s novels Madelon Lulofs painted rather unflattering images of the vacuous excesses that characterised European social life in plantation clubs. 60 This has been implied by Nieuwenhuys (1982b): 92.

26 Introduction

the Indies were part of a larger dialogue among colonial powers that was often played out in the exhibition halls and reading rooms of Europe. As I shall demonstrate in Chapter 1, Indonesians actively participated in this dialogue. Finally, it is important to acknowledge that European paintings, photographs and literary observations were creative reflections on landscape. The images that Europeans produced using these media were not simple reportage: they were also projections of ideals and anxieties, and therefore revealed the fantasies as well as the realities of Dutch colonists in the Indies.

F On terms and periodisation G

Before turning to the chapter summary, it is important to define more precisely what I intend by some of the terms and sources that I use throughout this dissertation. Firstly, I shall be referring alternately to ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’. Using both these terms allows for a more nuanced historical understanding of how images of the Indies were constructed by Dutch colonists than might have been possible had I restricted myself to simply ‘landscape’, for example. By the former I mean topography, primarily of a non-urban kind. I will also use ‘landscape’ to indicate a hand-made image of topography. By ‘nature’ I mean something similar to ‘environment’ in that it accounts for landscape but also encompasses experiential factors like climatic conditions. Dutch descriptions of how the Indies felt were often as important to the formation of cultural attitudes on nature as descriptions of how they were seen. This will become especially apparent in Chapter 6, where sensory experiences are linked to European constructions of gender in the tropics. ‘Nature’ also connotes non-urban spaces more strongly than ‘landscape’. Such spaces are the main focus of this thesis, despite occasional forays into urban topographies — a necessary digression, since it is impossible to speak meaningfully of the Dutch experience in the Indies without some reference to colonial cities.

Except where I mean to be specific about a person’s nationality, I often refer to ‘Dutch’, ‘European’ or ‘colonial’ residents of the Indies interchangeably. I maintain that the group of people who identified themselves as Europeans in the Indies tended to produce art and

27 Introduction

literature that differed qualitatively from the art of Asian inhabitants. Further, the art and literature of this ‘European’ or ‘colonial’ group derived from a cohesive set of cultural assumptions about Europeans and their position within Indies landscapes that distinguished these views from those of indigenous inhabitants. Whether artists or writers were Belgian, Hungarian or Dutch was ultimately less important to their sense of identity (not to mention their legal status) in the Indies than whether they were ‘European’ or ‘Native’. I have therefore included work by non-Dutch Europeans as artifacts of colonial culture from the Indies. Dutch sources, however, make up the bulk of examples referred to.

How to delineate things and peoples indigenous to the islands now part of the Republic of Indonesia is somewhat more difficult. Wherever specific ethnic groups are mentioned, such as Balinese or Sundanese, I refer to them as such to avoid generalisation. Elsewhere, I use ‘Indonesian’ or, more frequently, ‘Indies’. The former occurs most frequently in Chapter 1, where I discuss landscape in indigenous art and culture. Although I consider examples from periods well before the inception of the Republic of Indonesia in this chapter, I have retained the occasional use of the term ‘Indonesia’ for the sake of simplicity, and because I want to distinguish the sources I use from the European sources that I mostly rely upon in later chapters. In this latter part of the thesis, I try to restrict myself to the general term ‘Indies’ to delineate the conceptual space that most colonists acted within during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

I have found it useful to refer to ‘indigenous’ peoples as well as ‘natives’, even though the latter has acquired negative connotations because of its colonial associations. I have sometimes used ‘native’ to avoid repetition, and also because I believe it to be an appropriate contrast to ‘colonial’, ‘Dutch’ or ‘European’ in contexts where the latter represented something foreign and alien to indigenous peoples.

As for the periodisation I have adopted, the years between 1816 and 1942 might represent the duration of formal Dutch colonial rule over (parts of) the Indies, but the cultural roots and legacies of colonialism extended beyond these years, in both directions. While I am most concerned with the art produced by Europeans during the duration of the colonial

28 Introduction

state, I also delve into painterly antecedents in the VOC period, and literary explorations of colonialism in the 1950s. Dutch rule of the Indies culminated, during the early twentieth century, in the consolidation of the borders that the Republic of Indonesia would inherit in 1949. The establishment of a Dutch colonial state in the tropics provided the political and economic framework for the development of a more or less coherent Dutch colonial culture that found its expression, in part, through visual and textual discourses. The ‘long century’ of formal colonial rule in which this culture flourished followed from a longer period of Dutch involvement in the region, manifest in the guise of the VOC (Verenigde Oost- Indische Companie, or United East Indies Company) and its employees. When the VOC was dissolved due to financial pressures in the late eighteenth century, a decade of uncertain Dutch rule of the Indies ensued, exacerbated by tumult in Europe due to the Napoleonic Wars.61 A brief period of British rule of the Indies under Thomas began in 1811. This British interregnum was the result of Willem V’s machinations to prevent the Indies from falling into the hands of the revolutionary French. The arrangement for British stewardship of Dutch overseas territory also resulted in the forfeit of other possessions, from Cape Town on the southern tip of Africa to Melaka on the Malay peninsula. In 1816, the East Indies and Melaka alone, of all former Dutch possessions, were restored to the Netherlands.62 This broad archipelago scattered along the equator became the largest significant remaining bastion of Dutch power overseas. It was here that the Netherlands began to construct its last empire, which was to endure until the Japanese invasion of the Indies in 1942. The Dutch colonial state was swiftly dismantled during the years of occupation that followed. After 1945, when the Japanese were defeated, violent Dutch attempts to regain their colonial possessions were referred to circumspectly as ‘police actions’. In 1949, however, the Indonesian Revolution finally succeeded. The

61 In 1795 the was invaded by . When the VOC was dissolved, the Indies became the property of the government of the Netherlands. However, in 1806 Bonaparte placed his brother, Louis Napoleon, on the Dutch throne, and in 1808 Herman Willem Daendels — a Dutch military man who had been loyal to the French revolutionary cause — was sent to the Indies as Governor-General, and to fortify the colony against a possible British invasion. See MC Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia Since c 1200 (3rd Ed) (Basingstoke, 2001): 144–5. On Daendels see Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–1813 (London, 2005) [First published 1977]: 342–3. 62 Ricklefs (2001): 147–8. 29 Introduction

Netherlands Indies, and the peculiar colonial culture that had evolved within it, were relegated to memory and the pages of history.

It is important to note that the culture whose artifacts I consider here did not cease to exist suddenly in 1949, nor had it emerged from a vacuum in 1811. Throughout this thesis I often discuss the VOC-era antecedents of colonial visual culture in particular. I argue that the impact of seventeenth and eighteenth century painting and cartography on colonial art and literature was evident up until the very end of Dutch rule in the mid-twentieth century. The sources that I refer to also demonstrate how slow and, often, painful the cultural process of decolonisation was for the Dutch people who outlived the Netherlands Indies. Recollections of colonial life and landscapes continued to inform Dutch art and literature long after the declaration of Indonesian independence. The literary works of Maria Dermoût and Vincent Mahieu, which did not appear until the 1950s, provide a case in point. These sources highlight the problematic nature of periodising colonial art and literature, which is clearly not restricted to the lifespan of a colonial state. Strictly speaking, then, the years between 1816 and 1942 serve only to signify the political structure within which Dutch colonial culture was embedded. In real terms, the spatial and temporal parameters of this culture were far more fluid.

F Chapter Overview G

Part I of this thesis proposes two journeys, one through the landscapes of Indonesia as represented in indigenous modes of art, and one through the landscapes of the Netherlands Indies, tracing the steps of Dutch image-makers. These two landscapes were often spatially and historically congruous, but the contours that emerge differ according to the cultural routes that one follows.

Chapter 1 is intended, in part, as a contribution to the reconceptualisation of landscape as a

30 Introduction

category in Indonesian art. While this thesis concerns itself mainly with the place of nature and landscape in a Dutch artistic discourse, Chapter one does attempt to provide the foundation for a cursory comparison between indigenous and colonial modes of landscape representation. I argue that, superficially, Dutch and Indonesian elites often shared certain historical attitudes toward nature and landscape. However, in Chapter 2 I begin to signal crucial points of departure between the two traditions. I outline the geographical and political parameters in which a cultural and aesthetic discourse of nature and landscape evolved among the Dutch in the Indies. I broadly map where colonial views differed from indigenous images, a project that I explore more deeply in the following chapters by analysing the cultural work that certain constructions of landscape and nature performed for Dutch colonists living in the Indies.

Part II concerns itself with the development and maintenance of ideals (and anti-ideals) in Dutch colonial landscape art. Painters, writers and photographers took up the official tenets of rust en orde (peace and order) by which the Indies were governed and extended them to representations of landscape. The pragmatic concerns of planters, administrators and military men were often reflected in a complex language of aesthetics that rendered beautiful those landscapes that supported colonial prosperity and promoted an image of benevolent rule.

Chapter 3 analyses the parameters of colonial order, both real and imagined, that underpinned aesthetic norms in landscape art. Mapping and taxonomy, empirical strategies that were crucial to early European expansion in the seventeenth century, continued to provide the creative framework through which colonists apprehended the diverse and unfamiliar landscapes of the Indies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These tools functioned as both aesthetic and mnemonic devices — to represent and to remember the Netherlands Indies — not only in the visual arts, but also in literature. The practical creation of order began in the domestic gardens of colonists, where the battle to contain exuberant tropical nature was fought (in keeping with Dutch tradition) with flower pots. On a grander scale, the founding of a botanical garden at Buitenzorg in 1817 heralded the beginning of a long-lived, remarkably consistent visual discourse that associated

31 Introduction

governance with gardening. Plantations, the source of Dutch wealth in Southeast Asia throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were the ultimate symbol of order, but also the point of departure for consistencies between the ways in which landscapes were represented.

Chapter 4 shows how the panorama, a genre that reached its apogee in seventeenth century Dutch art, assumed new meaning in the context of the Netherlands Indies. Here, the panorama represented more than benign admiration of a stunning view, but also colonial claims to land use and ownership and a watchful eye, ever keen to navigate foreign and potentially hostile terrain. The real dangers of the landscape are usually firmly pushed outside the scope of the canvas. Conflict and instability were banished from colonial panoramas of the Indies, even when artists were reporting on landscapes that had recently been disturbed by an anti-colonial uprising, as exemplified by FVHA de Stuers’63 triumphalist ‘recollections’ of the . These did not ruminate upon the fighting so much as celebrate the restoration of order to Central Java’s landscapes. In this chapter particularly the work of painters, more so than of photographers or even of writers, was particularly important in maintaining an appearance of the status quo, the quiet, uncontested perpetuation of colonial rule.

Chapter 5 completes the discussion of idealised colonial landscapes and their antitheses with an analysis of why certain sacred or religious sites, but not others, were favoured by colonial artists. In keeping with the ideals of rust en orde, it was the seemingly benign contours of ancient and living Buddhist or Hindu landscapes that most appealed to colonial artistic sensibilities.

Part III moves away from ideals as such and into the complementary terrain of European anxieties over Indies nature and landscapes. Chapter 6 demonstrates that the tropical environment offered powerful seductions, but that these were laden with dangers as well as

63 For an overview of de Stuers’ advancement through the military ranks of the KNIL, from Second Lieutenant to Commander, and then Adjutant-General to the King of the Netherlands, see John Bastin and Bea Brommer, Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia (Utrecht, 1979): 335.

32 Introduction

pleasures, often in the guise of women and their associations with nature. European images from the Indies confirm the general colonial predilection for eroticising the ‘otherness’ of native women, and subjecting them to the probing gaze of photographers (and, to a lesser extent, painters). Importantly, artists in the Indies differentiated between women by class according to how they were represented in space. Further, Europeans in the Indies associated the sexuality of indigenous women explicitly with nature and the outdoors, whereas the French and British Orientalist artists had located their erotic fantasies in domestic interiors. Significantly, nature and landscape played a crucial mediating role in explaining the surrender of Dutch women to sexual temptation. It was the native character of landscape, then, rather than its gendering as a feminine temptress, that was the most powerful source of seduction to Dutch observers in the tropics.

Chapter 7 departs from the visual materials that have formed the primary sources of this thesis to make a case study of four well-known late colonial literary works: The Hidden Force (1900) by Louis Couperus, Rubber (1931) by Madelon Lulofs, and The Ten Thousand Things (1955) by Maria Dermoût. These novels suggest at the difficult cultural work that was performed by an explication of the concerns, discussed in the previous chapters, that dominated Dutch landscape art — namely, to furnish colonists with a stable identity that marked them out, to themselves as much as to their Indonesian subjects, as Europeans and as rulers. All three writers offer compelling perspectives on the dilemma of being Dutch in the tropics, an identity that had to be negotiated with respect to shifting definitions of private and public space, realms that were in turn governed by notions of ‘appropriate’ behaviour according to race, class and gender. Dermoût’s book provides a particularly nuanced insight into the mercurial nature of Dutch identities in the tropics. Her novel explored the deep allegiances to Indies landscapes and culture that were maintained by some Europeans who were born and raised in the tropics, and the tensions that resulted from reconciling these ‘Indo’ identities with Dutch personas. Often the former was a private preserve, restricted to the intimacies of family life and, significantly, childhood. It was in public, and in adulthood, that colonists were called upon to present their European selves to the world. Those Europeans who neglected to cultivate this skill of compartmentalising and moving between loyalties and personas and more particularly, the

33 Introduction

ability to function in a European world, faced the prospect of ostracism from ‘good’ colonial society. The natural world of the Indies, in this model, was associated with youth and indulgence, with family history and nostalgia. The landscapes of Europe, distant and unfamiliar though they may have been to some Dutch in the Indies, were associated with maturity, respectability and cultural partisanship. The progression from a hybrid, flexible identity grounded in an indigenous world to a Dutch identity rooted in a European landscape not only governed the formation of personal memories and social relationships, it was part of the colonist’s socialisation and life-cycle.

Dutch colonial attitudes to Indies nature and landscapes, then, were a cultivated taste that referred not only to a set of aesthetic preferences, but to the intricacies of constructing identities and building memories of place that were collectively shared, but also personally negotiated. Colonial art provides an insight into the problematic of being Dutch in the tropics, Europeans in an Asian landscape. The representation of nature and landscape in this art was often more a complex reflection of faultlines in the terrain of colonial culture.

34

F Part I G

Two Journeys

F Chapter 1 G

Landscape in Indonesian Art

Contemporary historical analyses of landscape art usually rely upon examples from Western and East Asian art and literature. Excepting the relatively recent publication of some important short studies,1 landscape as a category in Indonesian culture remains a neglected field of research. Perhaps this is because it is often difficult to make comparisons between Southeast Asia’s unique artistic heritage and those of other cultures. In Indonesia, art forms like dance, oral narratives, textiles, stone carvings, and manuscript illuminations and illustrations have figured prominently. However, few Indonesian cultures are able to demonstrate a clear pre-twentieth century tradition of landscape painting. Certainly, on Bali paintings techniques were applied to wall hangings for religious purposes. Manuscript illuminations and wayang art2 (on Java as well as Bali) also demanded painterly skills.3 Before the late nineteenth century there was, however, no equivalent to the Western and East Asian tradition of landscape painting as a genre in its own right. It is chiefly this absence of a widespread indigenous painting tradition that has excluded Indonesian from broader discussion of landscape art, and that has even led some scholars to question

1 Such as those by Peter Boomgaard, ‘Sacred trees and haunted forests: Indonesia, particularly Java, 19th and 20th centuries’ in Ole Brunn and Arne Kalland (eds), Asian Perspectives of Nature (, 1992), and ‘Oriental nature, its friends and its enemies: Conservation of nature in late-colonial Indonesia, 1889-1949’, Environment and History, 5(3), 1999: 257–93. See also Tony Day, ‘ “Landscape” in early Java’ in C Andrew Gerstle and Anthony Milner (eds) Recovering the Orient: Artists, Scholars, Appropriations (Chur, 1994), and Adrian Vickers, ‘Is there landscape in Indonesia?’ in Soul Ties: The Land and her People (Singapore, 1999). 2 By which I mean wayang kulit (shadow puppet theatre), wayang golek (wooden puppet theatre), wayang beber (scroll narratives), and wayang topeng (masked dance theatre). 3 Matthew Isaac Cohen, ‘Traditional and popular painting in modern Java’, Archipel, 69, 2005: 11. Cohen discusses the religious uses of painting in Bali, as well as painting in wayang art. For illumination techniques, see Ann Kumar and John H McGlynn (eds), Illuminations: The Writing Traditions of Indonesia (Jakarta, 1996). 1 – Landscape in Indonesian Art

whether ‘landscape’ exists as a category in Indonesian art at all.4 Most who have posed the question tend to conclude that landscapes certainly figured in Indonesian art, but not in ways that would be recognisable to Western or East Asian art specialists.5 Clearly, a new paradigm is necessary with which to evaluate landscapes as a category of Indonesian art, one that is less reliant on the example of non-Southeast Asian traditions, yet can account for indigenous responses to the foreign influences that frequently pervaded the region.

The aim of this chapter, then, is to suggest a tentative framework in which to revisit the notion of landscape in Indonesian art. This chapter also functions as the departure point from which my analysis of European landscape art from the Indies begins. The place where these two traditions met (and, more often, diverged) was of course in the physical landscapes and social context of nineteenth and early twentieth century Indonesia. Many of the comparisons between European and Indonesian ways of seeing and representing tropical landscapes that I shall be making throughout this thesis therefore have their origin in this chapter. In considering Indonesian art traditions, it has proven necessary for the discussion to encompass customs that pre-dated the nineteenth century, simply because many have uncertain dates of inception and, at any rate, were continued throughout the colonial period in more or less similar forms. In many cases it was not until the eve of Indonesian independence that indigenous art began to assume the recognisably ‘modern’ or ‘international’ guise that exists alongside the traditional arts today.6

Following Peter Boomgaard’s suggestion that class, among other social differentiators,

4 Day posits that classical poetry from Java does not provide the modern scholar with a conventional sense of landscape — (1994): 184. Vickers questions whether landscape is an indigenous Indonesian or an imported western notion — (1999): 35. 5 Day argued that landscape in poetry is not ‘visualisable’ and that even in Indonesian bas reliefs, landscape features tend to be listed rather than arranged naturalistically. Even in Balinese painting, Day contends, there is no ‘landscape’ as such — (1994): 184, 187, 191. Vickers points out that wide views and clear horizons are not indigenous to Indonesian arts — (1999): 40–1. 6 Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca and New York, 1967): 216. Holt considered S Sudjojono and his fellows to be the founders of an indigenous modern art movement in the 1930s.

37 1 – Landscape in Indonesian Art

must be accounted for when discussing historical attitudes to landscape in Indonesia,7 I make a distinction between the ways in which elite and commoner views of landscape have been expressed in Indonesian art. In some cases, notably in representations of sacred landscapes, elite and commoner views converged. This is partly accounted for by the fact that the distinction between ‘folk’ and ‘high’ art was rarely clear: wayang, for example, was (and is) an art that was performed for and understood by all classes of Javanese.8 However, the daily interactions of ordinary people with the landscapes around them differed qualititatively from the experiences of elites: for one thing, the vast majority of Indonesians were still living in rural communities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.9 Some arts that were sponsored by the upper classes — such as classical (ninth to fifteenth century) court poetry and temple carvings on Java — celebrated rulers and emphasised their privileged position within Indonesian landscapes. Indeed, there are some surprising parallels between the ways in which indigenous and colonial rulers represented themselves as imposers of order upon natural landscapes and used these images to legitimise their eminent positions. The tendency for rulers to employ art in the process of transforming nature into culture was also shared between some Indonesian and European modes of landscape art, a coincidence that reinforces the historical importance of class in forging

7 ‘We will have to be very specific as to whose attitude toward nature we are talking about …’: Peter Boomgaard, ‘Introducing environmental histories of Indonesia’ in Peter Boomgaard, Freek Colombijn and David Henley (eds), Paper Landscapes: Explorations in the Environmental History of Indonesia (Leiden, 1997): 18. 8 TE Behrend, ‘Textual gateways: The Javanese manuscript tradition’ in Ann Kumar and John H McGlynn (eds) Illuminations: The Writing Traditions of Indonesia (Jakarta, 1996): 161. This is particularly true for theatre performance: See Laurie J Sears, ‘Epic Voyages: The transmission of the Ramayana and Mahabharata from India to Java’ in Stephanie Morgan and Laurie Jo Sears (eds) Aesthetic Tradition and Cultural Transition in Java and Bali (Madison WI, 1984): 22. See also Laurie J Sears, Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales (Durham and London, 1996): 78, where she discussed the cultivation of folk arts like wayang in Javanese courts in the early twentieth century. This suggests that wayang became a widely understood medium in Javanese society in the late colonial period. 9 Peter Boomgaard, Children of the Colonial State: Popoluation Growth and Economic Development in Java, 1795–1880 (Amsterdam, 1989): 5. Boomgaard notes that, while a growing number of Javanese were employed in non-agricultural activities in the nineteenth century, the majority were still employed in agriculture. A similar pattern can be assumed for the other islands of the Netherlands Indies.

38 1 – Landscape in Indonesian Art

alliances between indigenous and foreign elites during the colonial period.10 There were, however, also insurmountable differences between Dutch and Indonesian elites in their attitudes toward landscape. Unlike Dutch colonists, who had no use for wilderness and wastelands, some Indonesian rulers derived authority from those landscapes considered beyond the sphere of culture as places of retreat and sources of spiritual power. In important instances, then, Indonesian ways of looking at landscape remained independent of European influences which, in any case, often jostled for expression with older Indic, Islamic and Chinese influences in Indonesian art and culture.

F Views from the palace G

It is difficult to avoid the pre-eminence of elite views of landscapes in discussions of Indonesian art, simply because those arts that were produced by and for Indonesian rulers and their courts have often best withstood the test of time. In the nineteenth century, royal courts harboured the largest concentrations of literate people, as well as resources to preserve documents and ritual artifacts.11 The stone carvings and monuments that were sponsored by pre-Islamic elites to celebrate their special relationship with gods and the cosmos have in many cases survived the centuries, most famously in the temples of Borobudur and Prambanan. Documentary and monumental sources are particularly prevalent on the islands of Java and Bali. This helps account for the disproportionate

10 On the alliance between indigenous and Dutch elites on Java, see Heather Sutherland, The Making of a Bureaucratic Elite: The Colonial Transformation of the Javanese ‘Priyayi’ (Singapore, 1980): 12–13, 25, 37, where she describes how the system of ‘indirect rule’ that prevailed on Java maintained the indigenous aristocracy, even while it qualitatively changed the nature of their power. Elevated positions in the native civil service were usually reserved for high-born Javanese, and many local rulers became dependent on Dutch approval for popular support. The Dutch also fancied themselves as colonial aristocrats, demanding traditional forms of obeisance from low-ranking Javanese. Alliances between indigenous and colonial elites were also crucial to the maintenance of imperialism in other settings, such as British India: see David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (London, 2001): 11, 13–14, where he argues that the British sought (and created) class analogies in their colonies. 11 Behrend: 161.

39 1 – Landscape in Indonesian Art

amount of scholarship on the arts of these islands, which is necessarily also reflected in the discussion here. It has only been in recent decades that the arts of the so-called Outer Islands, particularly Sumatra, have received greater scholarly attention.12

Although historically a ruler’s authority in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia was more dependent on control over labour than land,13 the notion of kingship was symbolically based on a ruler’s command over the landscape. As Jane Drakard has demonstrated, during the nineteenth century the sovereignty of Minangkabau kings in highland Sumatra was spatially represented in royal seals and letters. For the duration of the colonial period, Dutch authorities failed to grasp the significance of the sovereign’s large seal surrounded by the smaller seals of lesser rulers on the kingdom’s periphery, or of royal words surrounded by the names of a ruler’s descendants who had founded neighbouring kingdoms.14 This notion of power over space originating from a central locus in a mountain stronghold was common to many Southeast Asian civilisations. Kingship frequently resided symbolically in the image of the mountain — an axis from which authority emanated and which, historically, was often physically marked out with a temple.15 As we shall see in the more detailed discussion of mountains and sacred landscapes below, the notion that Indonesian rulers imposed order upon the natural environment was at the heart of concepts of kingship: natural disasters, for example, were frequently taken by Indonesians as an ominous portent of a king’s loss of authority.16

12 See, for example, Paul Michael Taylor and Lorraine V Aragon, Beyond the : Art of Indonesia’s Outer Islands (Washington, DC, 1991). 13 See Jeremy Kemp, Seductive Mirage: The Search for the Village Community in Southeast Asia (Dordrecht, 1988): 25, 29, also discussed in Ch 4. 14 Jane Drakard, A Kingdom of Words: Language and Power in Sumatra (Oxford and New York, 1999): 11, 153, 223–4. 15 Thomas Suárez, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia (Singapore, 1999): 20. Suárez reminds the reader that the centre of the state (as opposed to its borders, which commonly define the modern nation state) was also historically important in Chinese cosmology. 16 J Kathirithamby-Wells, ‘Sociopolitical structures and the Southeast Asian ecosystem: An historical perspective up to the the mid-nineteenth century’ in Ole Brunn and Arne Kalland (eds), Asian Perspectives of Nature (Copenhagen, 1992): 21, 32.

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With power comes privilege, and one of the luxuries that was available to Indonesian rulers as sovereigns of the natural world was water. Moats and ponds were an important feature of Balinese royal gardens, where they imitated the oceans of the world within a microcosm of the universe.17 Water also played an historic role in the ceremonies of Acehnese rulers. In 1613, Sultan had the Krueng Daroy (a branch of the Aceh River) diverted to flow through the royal citadel at Kota Dar ad-Dunia. His descendants were similarly concerned to demonstrate their greatness through harnessing water. Iskandar Muda’s successor, Sultan Iskandar Thani, had the banks of the same river beautified, and built a walled meditation garden (Taman Gairah) complete with mosque in a style that was possibly intended to mimic a mountain.18 In 1642 Iskandar Muda’s heir, Sultana Taj al- Alam, held a celebration in the waters of Mata Ië, a special place at the junction of two streams. Dutchmen who participated in and recorded the ceremony noted with interest the Sultana’s pleasure garden by the water and the fact that guests partook of a banquet partly submerged in the stream.19

Water gardens were also a feature of Central Javanese courts from at least the ninth century, as indicated by the archaeological remains of constructed ponds and pleasure gardens at Ratu Boko near Prambanan.20 Taman Sari in Yogayakarta, Java’s most famous garden, was known to the Dutch as the Waterkasteel (Water Castle). The extensive complex was built by Sultan I in 1758,21 and was pictured by many fascinated European artists in the colonial period, among them Willem von Geusau (1820s) and Jan Poortenaar (1920s).22 Part of the complex was restored in the twentieth century,23

17 Adrian Vickers, ‘Traditional gardens in Bali’ in William Warren (ed) Balinese Gardens (Singapore, 2000): 44, 47–8. 18 Anthony Reid, An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (Singapore, 2005): 133-4. 19 Reid (2005): 132. 20 Helen Ibbitson Jessup, Court Arts of Indonesia (New York, 1992): 118, 120. The Ratu Boko ruins were probably once part of a palace compound. 21 Jessup: 121, 123. 22 For water colours of Taman Sari by Von Geusau, see Yu-Chee Chong and Richard Hamblyn, Views of Indonesia (1848–1857) by Willem von Geusau (1814–1872) (Singapore, 199?) [Exact publication date

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but a view from the ramparts of the old compound suggests that the water gardens once encompassed an even larger area, the ruins of which now cradle a small township. Visitors can, however, still visit the tower room from which the Sultan had been able to chose a companion for the evening from among his many wives as they bathed in the pools below [Plate 2].

Javanese rulers shared this predilection for amassing water and women for their own enjoyment with the Islamic Mughal rulers of seventeenth century India, including the Shah Jahan (1592–1666), better known for devoting the Taj Mahal as a monumental tomb to the memory of his beloved wife. The Shah also commanded the Khas Mahal in Delhi, which boasted a viewing deck from which to watch his women bathe.24 As we shall see in Chapter 6, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Dutch painters and photographers indulged a similar voyeuristic urge to capture Indonesian women bathing in pools and rivers.25 Water brought to a ruler’s inner sanctums, then, demonstrated his or her command over nature and place at the centre of the kingdom. For males of the ruling class — surprisingly, perhaps, across several cultures — watered landscapes were also sometimes associated with erotic opportunity: for Muslim rulers, as a privilege indulged in private; for colonial observers, as an illicit pleasure often snatched in public.

The importance of order in elite views of landscape resided in the notion that rulers were privy to nature in a way that eluded their subjects, who were unfortunate slaves to its caprices. Classical26 Javanese poetry written for rulers and their courts often depicted landscapes as though viewed from the sky — a perspective associated with the lofty position of gods, or of holy men meditating upon mountain tops.27 As we shall see in unavailable]: 53, 55; and a drawing by Jan Poortenaar in his An Artist in Java and Other Islands of Indonesia (Oxford, 1990): 68. 23 Jessup: 121. 24 John Brookes, Gardens of Paradise: The History and Design of the Great Islamic Gardens (London, 1987): 156. 25 See Chapter 6. 26 Refers to the period between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. 27 Day: 187.

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Chapter 3, in the earliest Dutch illustrated maps of Indonesia produced during the seventeenth century, the same elevated viewpoint was favoured, a tendency that persisted in the landscape painting of the nineteenth century. Both indigenous and European elites, then, favoured ordered topographical views that positioned them strategically and authoritatively within Indonesian landscapes.

The prestige of pre-Islamic rulers on Java was further enhanced by their esoteric appreciation of landscape, which was a mark of their refinement. Once again, poetry played an important role in this construction of elitehood. Between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, the appreciation and composition of poetry required not only education and literacy, but spiritual discipline and fine sensibilities. Langö, or the ecstasy of losing oneself in the experience of beauty, was thought to be brought about by the creation and enjoyment of poetry. The art of writing poetry itself was termed kalangwan or kalangön, which was also used to denote ‘beauty’.28 Poets (who were courtiers, or sometimes rulers themselves) were expected to seek their inspiration in the landscapes removed from the kraton (palace), typically mountains and deserted coastlines.29 These locales were not necessarily in the ‘wilderness’. Far from it: hermitages accommodating noble guests and educated travellers often combined court culture with the pleasures of country life.30

The Desawarnana, a courtly poem written about the royal progress of King Rajasanagara through the East Javanese countryside in 1359, provides a case in point.31 Rajasanagara

28 PJ Zoetmulder, Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature (The Hague, 1974): v. Thanks to Peter Worsley for first bringing this to my attention. 29 Zoetmulder: 170, 172. 30 Zoetmulder: 203–5. 31 Mpu Prapañca was a generic term for a high courtly official and a title often conferred upon writers of kakawin. Copies of the Desawarnana manuscript, which came originally from Java, were found on Bali and West Lombok in 1894, and were translated and generally known among colonial scholars by the mid-1920s. However, according to Stuart Robson, the manuscript would have been little known in its own time. Nonetheless, the poem represents a good example of the thematic concerns of the types of kakawin that are described in this chapter. See Stuart Robson’s translation of Mpu Prapañca, Desawarnana (Nagarakrtagama) (Leiden, 1995), and the discussion on pages 1–16.

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was ruler of the the Hindu Central Javanese kingdom of between 1350 and 1389, and Mpu Prapañca, a court poet and high official, completed the kakawin in September 1365.32 It describes the king’s journey in some detail, including rest stops at hermitages near Gede and Sagara, which are celebrated in the following terms: ‘It was splendid and extraordinary, in the midst of the wooded mountains, its layout bewilderingly beautiful.’ 33 (In fact, Mpu Prapañca poetically diverges from his duty to narrate the king’s journey at one point — as he was occasionally expected to do, no doubt — by waxing lyrical about his own experience of the hermitages’ beauty).34 More prosaic events are also recorded, such as the purpose of the king’s perambulations — namely, to be seen to concern himself with the prosperity of his people.35 The description of the countryside itself, and the naming of places, is equally crucial to reinforcing Rajasanagara’s authority over the landscapes and people of his kingdom.36

Superficially, at least, the image of indigenous elites presiding over an ordered landscape was not far removed from the ideals of nineteenth and twentieth century Dutch colonists. This similarity is particularly evident in the significance attributed to gardens, which are

32 Robson: 1. 33 Mpu Prapañca: 46. 34 But the poet was not in constant attendance upon the king, as he was absorbed in enjoying the beautiful scenery: Wandering light-heartedly, lost in thought, carefree, forgetting all else … : Canto 32, p 46. 35 See Robson’s discussion on p 9, and a speech given in the king’s presence by the Prince of Wengker, Cantos 88 and 89 on pp 89–90: … Bridges, main roads, waringin-trees, houses and so on and all kinds of useful public works must be put in order.

The main thing is that ricefields, dry and irrigated — whatever is planted, let it be fruitful, guard and cherish it! Any land that has been made into village land must continue so, and not become neutral ground … … it is the expansion of the country districts that should be striven for.

To which the king replies: … if the fields are ruined, then the city too will be short of sustenance. 36 Robson: 9.

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discussed in the colonial context in Chapter 3. In the Muslim courts of Indonesia, the Qur’an often provided the model for such gardens, complete with fruit trees, lavish pavilions and, ideally, streams representing the four rivers of paradise.37 In Javanese courts, a mixture of Islamic and antecedent Hindu beliefs informed the structure of royal gardens. Walled palace compounds were built to imitate the structure of the cosmos, and were intended as spaces for meditation.38 A similar idea prevailed on Bali, where royal gardens encapsulated the nexus between the sacred mountains of the interior (signified by the pointed roofs of buildings) and the sea (signified by ponds and moats within the compound). The palace at Klungkung had such a garden, with a floating pavilion surrounded by a lotus pond symbolising the sacred Mt Meru at the centre of the oceans and continents.39 It is worth noting that the Hindu-Javanese and -Balinese notion of the garden as a place of spiritual purity has its Christian counterpart in the ideas that underpinned the construction of the first botanical gardens in Europe during the sixteenth century. These were also intended as spaces for retreat and meditation.40 On Bali, ornamental gardens were the sole preserve of kings and priests before the arrival of the Dutch in the mid-nineteenth century: thereafter began the slow progress of secular influence.41

Where indigenous attitudes to landscape differed from those of colonial elites was in the representation and meaning of wilderness. Before the development of transport infrastructure in the nineteenth century, which enhanced the mobility of ordinary Indonesians, it was — in theory, if not always in practice42 — the prerogative of rulers and

37 Brookes: 17. 38 Alit Veldhuisen-Djajasoebrata, Weavings of Power and Might: The Glory of Java (Rotterdam, 1988): 25. 39 Vickers (2000): 44, 47–8. 40 John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Recreation of Paradise (New Haven and London, 1981): 10. 41 Vickers (2000): 44, 47. Vickers notes how gardens on Bali progressed in the post-colonial era from reflecting secular change to revealing government influence. An example is the government’s introduction of the tamanisasi (gardenisation) program — a bid to diversify the Balinese diet with a larger variety of foods. These were cultivated in geometric, orderly arrangements. 42 See Jean Gelman Taylor, Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (New Haven and London, 2003): 227, where she posits that, before the mid-nineteenth century, Javanese royals rarely visited the countryside.

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holy men to tour the countryside.43 In fact, it was a king’s journey into the landscapes beyond the palace that symbolically linked the court and countryside together as spheres of human society and culture.44 In kakawin, those spaces that were not densely populated, and were therefore beyond the centres of human civilisation — coastlines, mountains, and forests, for instance — were nevertheless important sites for the exercise of elite agency. These landscapes became the destination of what Peter Worsley has recently designated ‘religious odysseys’ — places where a ruler’s spiritual prowess might be tested by gods, demons, corruptions and temptations.45 In kakawin, the wilderness was represented as a setting for experiences as disparate as seduction, war, and meditation: a ‘disaggregated world’ that was only unified by its opposition to the orderly confines of the palace.46 Interestingly, this diverges from the Islamic ideal, where wilderness is typically eschewed in favour of the walled retreat from nature.47

Of course, neither elites nor commoners cherished wilderness for its own sake. Like Dutch colonists, Indonesian rulers were keen to impose order upon landscapes, and commoners relied upon the acculturation of landscapes (through cultivation) to survive. However, wilderness existed as an important metaphysical counterpart to the material authority that order signified. Representations of mountains and forests in the Ramayana epic often dwell upon the exile of King Rama in the Nandaka forest, where his spiritual strength is tested when his wife Sita is kidnapped [Plate 1]. For rulers and holy men in those parts of Indonesia that were subject to Indic influences, the wilderness was a source of spiritual potency, even after conversion to Islam. Dutch elites could not draw upon this narrative of legitimacy because they discounted wilderness altogether. The notion that Javanese rulers drew strength and legitimacy from their experiences in the wild therefore differs radically from the bases of colonial authority in Indonesian landscapes. Dutch elites did not partake

43 Zoetmulder: 203. 44 Peter Worsley, ‘Old myths and new approaches: advances in the interpretation of ancient religious sites in Southeast Asia’. Paper given 13–15 July 2005 at the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies and the Monash Institute, Melbourne: 3. (With kind permission from the author). 45 Worsley: 2. 46 Worsley: 6. 47 Brookes: 199.

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in the narrative ritual of spiritual trial in the wilderness. On the contrary, colonial planters and administrators set out to erase these landscapes altogether, either through transforming them into ordered, productive spaces, or through simple lack of recognition (see Chapter 3). In so doing it is arguable that, on Java and Bali at least, where the legend of the prince retreating to the wilderness before his emergence as a more powerful leader survived in the well-known Ramayana and Mahabharata epics that continue to inform wayang art, the Dutch excluded themselves from an important narrative of legitimacy that was based on indigenous rulers’ relationship with landscape.

F Views from the countryside G

To some extent, elite and commoner representations of Indonesian landscapes were often ‘mutually intelligible’.48 Artists and craftspeople frequently produced both for villages and royal courts, particularly for ritual purposes.49 The sacred association between mountains and the sea, for instance, was understood by the ordinary people of Bali and Java as well as by their rulers. On Bali, temples are typically located both in highlands and on the coast.50 These two realms often had complex meanings attached to them. On Bali, the coast is thought to be a powerful landscape because it is where the forces of land and water converge. On the one hand, the sea is often imbued with purifying properties. It is the final destination of cremation processions, where the scattering of ashes into the sea represents the release of the deceased person’s soul.51 On the other hand, the ocean is also perceived

48 That is, until the twentieth century and the advent of modernist art movements which, as in Europe, were initially only intelligible and relevant to educated elites — Holt: 257. 49 Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters (Kuala Lumpur, 1994): 48. 50 Henk Schulte-Nordholt, Bali: Colonial Conceptions and Political Change 1700–1940 (Rotterdam, 1986): 23. 51 Garrett Kam, Perceptions of Paradise: Images of Bali in the Arts (Ubud, 1993): 170.

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as a source of scourges.52 Dutch visitors to Bali before the Pacific War were quickly introduced to local rituals that were intended to deflect disease and misfortune. At the house of the Belgian artist Adrien Jean le Mayeur de Merprès, who lived at Sanur beach with his Balinese wife from the 1930s onward, one can still observe the shrines that were erected to placate the visiting gods of Nusa Penida from across the water.53 Indeed, in this region of Bali the sea between the southeast coast and the adjacent island of Nusa Penida is represented in local lore as a fragile barrier separating mainlanders from danger.54 The Swiss artist Theo Meier, who lived at Sanur between 1936 and 1942, was so impressed with a ritual that was intended to ward off the menace residing across the water that he committed his memories of it to a painting, executed in 1979 and entitled Purification by the Sea [Plate 3]. It shows two tall protective spirit effigies known as barong landung against the backdrop of the coast. These figures are brought out annually at the onset of the wet season, when disease is common. They are thought to frighten the harbingers of misfortune — Jero Gede (‘great lord’) and his consort, Jero Luh — back to Nusa Penida.55

Throughout Indonesia, the spatial relationship between the sea and mountains is an important organising principle in art, ritual and social relations. The distinction between ‘upstream’ (toward the mountain) and ‘downstream’ (toward the sea) is widespread.56 The belief that mountains are sacred is one that ordinary Indonesians have long held in common

52 Hildred Geertz has recently commented on this ambiguity as being typical of Balinese concepts of tenget (hauntedness), in that sacred sites host both gods and demons, both good and evil forces: see The Life of a Balinese Temple: Artistry, Imagination, and History in a Peasant Village (Honolulu, 2004): 40. 53 From my own observations made in May 2004. 54 I have not been able to find information that addresses how the people of Nusa Penida (who regard themselves as Balinese according to Rodolpho A Giambelli in ‘Working the land: Babad as forest clearing and the analogy between land and human fertility in Nusa Penida (Bali)’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 155(4), 1999: 494) respond to mainland fears associated with their island, and whether the people of Nusa Penida are equally wary of the sea between their island and Bali. 55 Kam: 103. 56 Orientation is a major organising principle throughout Indonesia, including in Balinese cosmology — Kam: 170. Patterns on batik are often associated with spatial orientation — Veldhuisen-Djajasoebrata: 2. It is also a familiar concept in the Islamic Middle East, where men’s bathing locales are often upstream from those of women — Brookes: 193.

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with their rulers. Further, until the late colonial period, large populations were often concentrated in the mountainous regions of the archipelago rather than on the coast, particularly on Sumatra.57 Many scholars have suggested that Indonesians still distinguish themselves from one another according to whether they come from the mountains or live on coastal plains. Coastal people on Java are known to inland dwellers as pasisirir, or ‘beach people’, who are stereotyped as flamboyant, materialistic and a little vulgar. Conversely, inlanders are often viewed by coastal people as conservative and snobbish.58 Some of these divisions may have been accentuated by the arrival of Islam, which spread faster and more comprehensively in Indonesia’s coastal zones than in the more isolated mountain regions.59

Most of the pre-Islamic monuments on Sumatra and Java have been discovered in interior regions, such as the temple ruins on Java’s Dieng plateau and the stone relics at Besemah in Sumatra.60 This was often a surprise to European observers who, in the late nineteenth century, had distinguished the lowland plains of Sumatra as the ideal site for cultivating export crops like tobacco and rubber. The Minangkabau kingdom, isolated as it was from the coast by a barrier of mountains, retained an aura of mystique among Europeans until well into the nineteenth century.61 In the pre-modern era there were practical reasons for some Indonesians to avoid the coast. Compared to lowland regions, mountainous zones were less prone to flooding and less susceptible to malaria and water-borne diseases. Coastal zones were densely covered with , which is damp and therefore difficult to clear for cultivation using the slash-and-burn methods that were favoured in the sparsely populated regions of Southeast Asia.62 From the seventeenth century onwards, coastlands were also becoming the province of Europeans who made unwelcome additional demands

57 Reid (2005): 15, 50, 55. Reid notes that in 1907, for example, the island of Samosir in , Sumatra, though not particularly suited to agriculture, managed to sustain a population of 74,000 people. 58 Inger McCabe Elliot, Batik: Fabled Cloth of Java (New York, 1984): 94. 59 See Robyn Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia: Tradition, Trade and Transformation (Oxford, 1990): 349; and Reid (2005): 66. 60 Reid (2005): 50. Reid also gives additional examples for Sumatra. 61 Drakard: 16, 57. 62 Boomgaard (1997): 47, 187.

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on local labour.63 All these factors, according to Anthony Reid, functioned as deterrants to the settlement of Sumatra’s coast before Dutch colonisation. By the late nineteenth century, however, conditions had changed. Population shifts to the coast were encouraged by large- scale public works programs undertaken by the colonial state, as well as the lure of employment on plantations.64 On Java, it was the new economic opportunites created by a burgeoning colonial economy, together with the disruptive impact of the Java War in the interior, that led to the displacement of the population from the hinterland to the coast in the nineteenth century.65

Forested landscapes have rarely been densely inhabited places in Indonesia. Rainforest soils are not very fertile, since most of their nutrients reside in a top layer of humus, and therefore do not sustain intensive agriculture. Rainforest provides little nutritious food for animals or humans, and worse, often hosts parasites and other sources of illness. Peter Boomgaard has speculated that these inhospitable features of rainforest landscapes may form the original basis of the once widespread belief in Indonesia that forests were haunted by evil spirits.66 Commoners who lived on forest borders often upheld the notion that these were supernatural landscapes that required special spiritual powers to survive within. Such spaces were not the province of ordinary people, but of gods, demons and powerful kings, and their separateness from the human realm of the countryside was maintained by taboos.67 The notion that forests, mountain tops and grave sites were sacred or haunted is

63 Reid (2005): 48, 54, 60–4. Reid has argued that it was Dutch intervention on the coast of Java that kept inhabitants inland until the mid-eighteenth century, when the Dutch gained the pasisir (north coast region of Java) and colonial activity began to provide new economic opportunities rather than cause adverse disruptions. 64 Kathirithamby-Wells: 25–6; Reid (2005): 55, 63. 65 Reid (2005): 48. The theme of opportunism is also relevant for Sumatra, where highlanders responded positively to the advantages of modernity brought by colonialism. Today, highlander Sumatrans like the Minangkabau and the Toba and Karo are among the best educated and upwardly mobile ethnic groups in Indonesia — see Reid (2005): 67. 66 Boomgaard (1997): 47, 187. 67 Hunters, who also moved through forest landscapes, were considered separate from village society. Peter Worsley has shown how this view prevailed in classical Javanese court poetry (2005: 9), and Peter

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often signified by the term keramat: in , the same idea is indicated by the term angker; in West Java, by sinapel,68 and on Bali and Nusa Penida, by the word tenget.69 Similar notions are expressed in the languages of other Indonesian ethnic groups.70

In a fascinating study of land clearing rituals on Nusa Penida, Rodolpho Giambelli has demonstrated how the concept of tenget is still linked to the notion that spirits are the original occupants of forested spaces. To transform these landscapes from nature into culture — from forest into rice field — involves permission-seeking rituals. Where these duties are shirked, the land-clearer is expected to suffer misfortune.71 Similar rituals have been observed in Flores, Timor, Seram, , Sumatra, and parts of Java.72 Boomgaard has argued that, on Java, such beliefs appear to have declined (though not to the point of non-existence) since the colonial era. Around 1900, Dutch observers were still able to document the Javanese belief that sickness, mania or worse could follow from intruding upon a sacred forest or felling a taboo tree.73 However, the frightening spirits that were once commonly associated with trees and forests — such as the gendruwo, a tall, hairy male spirit given to spitting sirih juice and throwing stones, and the wewe, a witch-like female spirit who steals children — are now a less frequent source of concern among , in keeping with the dwindling of forests themselves.74 Under the VOC commercial tree cropping increased, but as locals observed the felling of taboo trees under Dutch instructions without incurring any penalties from angered spirits, indigenous beliefs were modified.75 On Timor, sandalwood forests were believed to be haunted, but from the

Boomgaard has demonstrated the same view of hunters as forest-dwellers in Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600–1950 (New Haven and London, 2001): 112–13. 68 Boomgaard (1997): 46–7. 69 Giambelli: 496–7. 70 Peter Boomgaard (1999), ‘Oriental nature, its friends and its enemies: Conservation of nature in late-colonial Indonesia, 1889–1949’, Environment and History, 5(3): 264. 71 Giambelli: 489, 503, 513. 72 Giambelli: 499, 503–4. 73 Boomgaard (1997): 44. 74 Boomgaard (1997): 43–4, 48. 75 Boomgaard (1997): 47–8.

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sixteenth century locals had deemed it acceptable to fell trees for commercial purposes.76 By the late nineteenth century, when sandalwood was increasingly scarce, cultural prohibitions against felling were also relaxed on Sumba.77 The expansion of Islam, which does not recognise trees and forests as sacred, may also have led to the modification of Indonesian beliefs in animated nature.78

F Sacred landscapes G

Just as forests have gradually had their keramat properties attenuated over time, so the general association between landscape and sacred cosmology appears to have undergone a subtle transformation since the colonial era. John Pemberton’s observations on the relationship between mountains and the sea in contemporary Javanese culture provide a case in point. In south Central Java, the Indian Ocean is thought to be presided over by Ratul Kidul, ‘spiritual consort and protrectress’ of Central Java’s kings. The lands between Mt Lawu and the mythic forest of Krendhawana near , Mt Merapi near Yogyakarta, and Parangtritis (the southern coast) are still, in Pemberton’s words, ‘crisscrossed with spiritual traces of political exiles, legendary ascetics, aspiring kings, and revolutionaries’.79 The rulers of Central Java traditionally made annual offerings to the mountains and the sea in order to maintain the ‘cosmological circuitry’ of the region.80 In recent times, however, the plethora of built monuments that are sprinkled throughout the district have attracted more devotional interest than the landmarks themselves. Pemberton has suggested that this shift in attention has created new kinds of ‘k[e]ramat topography’81 that replace the sacred power of mountains and the sea with relics and repositories of human culture. It is possible that this shift in cultural attitudes has been sponsored by

76 Boomgaard (1997): 18. 77 Boomgaard (1997): 18. 78 Boomgaard, (1997): 40. 79 John Pemberton, On the Subject of ‘Java’ (Ithaca and London, 1994): 370. 80 Pemberton: 371. 81 Pemberton: 276. Pemberton points to contemporary interest in the tomb complex at as an example. (Note that kramat is a spelling variation on keramat).

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Indonesian official historians, one of whom has suggested that Java’s candi (temples/tombs) ought to be viewed as ‘cultural pusaka’ (magical heirlooms).82

Interestingly, the attention given to temples and ruins in contemporary Indonesia is congruent with the interest that Europeans expressed in the nineteenth century, when complexes like Borobudur and Prambanan in Central Java were being catalogued and restored by colonial expedition teams (see Chapter 5). In this context, it is important to recall that the form and location of Borobudur, for instance, was chosen by its Buddhist architects in the late eighth and early ninth centuries to reflect its sacred association with the mountain as both a physical presence in the landscape of Central Java and as a symbol of Mt Meru, the axis of the universe.83 Thomas Súarez has posited that Borobudur represents one of the earliest cosmological maps in Southeast Asia, since it mimics both the shape of a mountain (it was built over a hill) and also symbolises the structure of the universe.84 Other scholars have noted that to ascend Borobudur is to follow a lesson in the soul’s journey to enlightenment.85 The bas reliefs in the walls of Borobudur’s lowest tiers show scenes from daily life — including Indonesian landscapes, such as teeming forest views — that represent earthly existence [Plate 4]. The higher tiers offer more exalted themes, such as the lives of bodhisattvas and of the Buddha himself. At the topmost level are the bell-shaped dagobas containing Buddha statues. This area is entirely without walls, and is thought by some scholars to symbolise the achievement of formlessness through enlightenment.86

Mountains occupy a special position in Asian cosmologies, where they are often the subject of origin myths and have long been revered as the home of spirits and ancestors.87 Mountains have been the site of Daoist temples and pilgrimages, as well as a focus of

82 See, for example, R Soekmono, ‘The candi as cultural pusaka’ in Haryati Soebadio (ed) Art in Indonesia (New York, 1992): 52. 83 Súarez: 20. 84 Súarez: 34. 85 Wright: 38, 44. 86 Holt: 45–7. Most scholars follow Holt’s interpretation. 87 Kathirithamby-Wells: 20.

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Chinese literature and landscape painting, since at least the Ming dynasty (fifteenth to mid- sixteenth centuries).88 In Japan, the ambiguous and potentially dangerous space between nature and culture is signified by the term yama, which means both ‘wild’ and ‘mountain’.89 As in Indonesia, mountains in Japan were thought to bridge the gap between heaven and earth, which is why they often housed Zen Buddhist monasteries and were generally associated with spiritual retreat.90 Interestingly, Japan’s origins myths have the islands and its gods emerge from the sea.91 One might reasonably have expected analogous myths from the island inhabitants of Indonesia. However, the opposite is in fact true: it is mountains that are often the basis of Indonesian origin myths. One version of a Balinese myth has it that the island was originally flat, and that when Islam came to Java the Hindu gods fled to Bali and raised the mountains, chief among them Mt Agung, to dwell upon. Another version has it that the mountains were simply transported from East Java to Bali.92 Some Batak groups in Sumatra trace their origins to Si Raja Batak, who supposedly descended from the mountain, Pusuk Buhit, that overlooks the western shore of Lake Toba in order to establish a village and wet rice fields at Sianjur Mula-Mula. Si Raja Batak’s two sons purportedly became the founders of the Batak moieties, Lontung and Sumba.93

As discussed above, mountains were also strongly associated with Southeast Asian notions of kingship. Indonesian rulers linked their authority with the pre-eminence of mountains in the landscape. Mountains also symbolised a king’s role as mediator between heaven and earth. When kings died, it was often believed that their spirits would return to their ancestors on the mountain, and their tombs thereafter became sites of pilgrimage.94 Some

88 Stephen Little, ‘Landscape painting of the Ming Dynasty’ in Liu Yang (ed) Fantastic Mountains: Chinese Landscape Painting from the Musuem (Sydney, 2004): 11–14. 89 Arne Kalland, ‘Culture in Japanese nature’ in Ole Brunn and Arne Kalland (eds), Asian Perspectives of Nature (Copenhagen, 1992): 223. 90 Elaine Gerbert, ‘Creating courses on the environment from Asian perspectives: Visualising nature in Japan’, Education about Asia, 6(2), 2001: 18. 91 Gerbert: 20. 92 Súarez: 34. 93 Reid (2005): 54. 94 Jessup: 223. Jessup gives the examples of Imogiri and Ijo on Java.

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of the batik patterns that were formerly reserved for the exclusive use of the Central Javanese aristocracy — such as the alas-alasan (forest pattern) motif and the semen (sprouting vines) pattern — often contained the sacred mountain as part of a landscape filled with birds and animals, shrines, ponds, and trees.95 Commoners were also alert to the mountain’s warning that a king no longer enjoyed a divine mandate. The eruption of volcanoes in Indonesia has often been associated with inauspicious times and political upheaval. In 1963, for example, when Mt Agung (the volcano near the important temple of Puri Besakih) erupted, it was viewed by many Balinese as a sign of ‘cosmic imbalance’ because it coincided with a major ceremony that was to be held at the temple, as well as with plagues and crop failures.96

The image of the cosmic mountain has had a strong influence on Indonesian modes of sacred architecture, commonly observed in the upper sections of Hindu and Buddhist temple structures,97 but also extant in the distinctive peaked roofs of Indonesian mosques as well as in secular architecture.98 The sacred mountain is found across many other Indonesian art forms. Mountain images appear, in abstract form, on some of the oldest artifacts discovered in Indonesia, including kettle drums from Dong-son era (eighth to second centuries BCE) Vietnam.99 The taman arum (scented garden) motif that often appears on batik is symbolic of Mt Meru.100 In wayang imagery from Java and Bali, the cosmic mountain appears in the form of the kayonan (‘like a tree’) or gunungan (‘like a mountain’) puppet [Plate 5], which assumes a pointed tip on Java and a more uniformly rounded shape on Bali. The gunungan/kayonan opens and closes a wayang performance, generally represents a change of scene, can symbolise fate or a disturbance of nature when it is fluttered, signifies the home of the gods, represents fire (when reversed), a

95 Maxwell: 199. 96 Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca and London, 1995): 17. The ceremony was the Eka Dasa Rudra. 97 Wright: 38. 98 Hugh O’Neill, ‘Southeast Asia’ in Martin Frishman and Hasan-Uddin Khan (eds), The Mosque: History, Architectural Development and Regional Diversity (London, 2002): 228. 99 Wright: 36. 100 Maxwell: 199.

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single tree or an entire forest, and, of course, symbolises a mountain.101 In the Outer Islands, too, mountains sometimes appear in art as symbols of the cosmos. For example, an early twentieth century carved bamboo tube made by the Ngaju people of Central depicts a layered world, where the mountains of the upper tier are inhabited by gods.102

The presence of a god is also often represented in Indonesian art by the appearance of sacred flowers. In Balinese traditional art, a shower of blossoms usually signifies the presence of a powerful being.103 One of the most ubiquitous floral symbols in Southeast Asian art is perhaps the lotus. Because of the way a lotus grows, pushing through murky water to bloom above the surface, it was often employed in Hindu and Buddhist art to symbolise spiritual transformation and the awakening of consciousness. Thus, gods are often pictured enthroned upon or holding a lotus flower.104 In Bali, the lotus also sometimes represents Mt Meru. Hildred Geertz recently noted that the pura desa (village temple) of Batuan features a padmasana, a tall throne for Siwa in the form of a lotus. Its intricate carvings are meant to represent the teeming life of the universe.105

Another common symbol of the world in Indonesia is the tree. While scholars of Outer Islands art have questioned the claim that the ‘tree of life’ symbol is universal throughout the archipelago,106 they do tend to recognise that where the tree is invoked it is generally identified as a symbol of the cosmos. In the Central Javanese courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta, the waringin (banyan) trees that stand before the kraton symbolise the world,

101 Holt: 134–5; See also John H McGlynn, Language and Literature: Indonesian Heritage (Singapore, 1999): 52. In some instances, Holt and McGlynn differ on interpretations, so I have simply listed all the meanings given by both authors. 102 Taylor and Aragon: 150. The middle tier is occupied by humans, and the lower, watery tier is inhabited by a dragon or water snake deity. 103 Kam: 136. 104 Kam: 177. 105 Hildred Geertz (2004): 117, 120. 106 Taylor and Aragon: 35. The authors argue that the phrase ‘tree of life’ has no genuine counterpart in Indonesian languages.

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their tops representing the sky, and the enclosure that surrounds them signifying the four corners of the earth (or, alternatively, chaotic nature restrained by human endeavour, according to another interpretation that Boomgaard has mentioned).107 Throughout Java protective spirits are thought to reside in village banyan trees, a belief that can be traced to at least the fifteenth century.108 On Bali, banyans similarly occupy central places in the landscapes of ordinary people and elites alike. Bingin (or waringin) trees stand at major crossroads, before temples, and in palace grounds.109

F Art and the transformation of nature into culture G

One of the more intriguing themes to emerge from analyses of Indonesian art is that representations of landscape were often instrumental in symbolically taming nature and transforming it into a sphere of human activity, a process that has parallels in western art (see Chapter 3). In Java between the ninth and fifteenth centuries CE, high culture played an important part in this process of transformation. Classical Javanese poetry revolved around the concept of langö which, as discussed above, was a term that denoted both something beautiful as well as the experience of being overcome by beauty. Such an event was thought most likely to occur in a place beyond human culture — a mountain, cave or forest, for instance. Here one received the inspiration to create a thing of beauty, like poetry (kalangwan), and thereby achieved unity with beauty itself.110 The artistic product of such an expedition was sometimes refered to as a candi bhasa, or ‘language temple’.111

The poetic transformation of nature into culture was thought to be the special province of elites, in particular, their words and deeds. ‘ “Landscape” in early Java’, Tony Day has written, ‘is a record of where its kings have placed their immortal footsteps. What kings

107 Boomgaard (1997): 45. 108 Taylor (2003): 98. 109 Vickers (2000): 43. 110 Supomo Suryohudoyo, ‘The sovereignty of beauty: Classical Javanese writings’ in Ann Kumar and John H McGlynn (eds), Illuminations: The Writing Traditions of Indonesia (Jakarta, 1996): 24. 111 Suryohudoyo: 24.

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made visible as “landscape” they claimed as a world naturally their own.’112 The influence of script and words in classical Java is attributed considerable importance by Day, who argues that its emphasis of movement across a surface is peculiarly well developed in Javanese art forms compared to those of Europe, China or India.113 In the context of classical art and landscape, Day asserts that ‘the act of writing itself in early Java expresses the spatial expansion of the king’s rule, a process of ceremonial touring and chartered settlement which transformed Javanese nature into a representable “landscape”.’114 Javanese art in the classical period can therefore generally be characterised as ‘a celebration of the conquest of nature’.115

Jane Drakard’s study of royal letters and seals from the Minangkabau kings of Sumatra supports similar conclusions about the importance of script and surface in Indonesian modes of representing landscape.116 Further, some scholars have argued that Balinese art ought not to be gazed upon in the same way that much western art is viewed. Jean Couteau, for example, has argued that since Balinese paintings are mostly made up of patterns, the eye is encouraged to roam across a surface rather than focus or rest upon a particular point.117 Couteau has gone so far as to argue that one ‘reads’ a Balinese painting rather than looks at it.118 This action is encouraged by one of the distinguishing characteristics of Balinese art — the ‘full occupation of space’, or the value of ramé (busy-ness, crowdedness) — a particularly pronounced quality in the painting of Batuan.119 Ramé is a social and religious value as well as an aesthetic one. Hildred Geertz’s work has been instrumental in elucidating the Balinese perception that landscapes are occupied by nature as well as by the supernatural. Particularly at religious ceremonies, space is thought to be

112 Day: 202. 113 Day: 194. 114 Day: 197. See also his comments at pp 194, 201. 115 Day: 201. 116 Drakard: 223–4. See also Annabel Teh Gallop’s discussion of writing in ‘An Acehnese style of manuscript illumination’, Archipel, 68, 2004: 193–240. 117 Couteau: 7, 135. 118 Couteau: 137. 119 Couteau: 132–3.

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crowded with visible humans and invisible deities.120

In a wider context, modern Indonesian words often indicate an ancient association between the progress of culture and the taming of nature. On Bali and Java, babad signifies the literary genre of historical or genealogical chronicles, but may also have meant ‘to clear land’ in Old Javanese.121 On Nusa Penida, the term mababad still refers to the process of forest clearing.122 In wayang kulit, babad is one of the words that is used to denote the beginning of the play and other moments when the kayonan/gunungan first appears. Giambelli speculates that the semantic link between these different uses of the term babad originated in the notion of ‘transformation’: the emergence of a new situation, be it a clearing in a forest, or a new scene in a theatrical performance.123 Further, these usages suggest a long process by which ‘the history of the land becomes the history of the people who have cleared the land and made it agriculturally productive.’124 Indeed, by the time the Dutch arrived in the Indies, those Javanese who were village heads with rights to a house, garden and rice land were generally those whose ancestors had cleared forest to make way for agriculture in the first instance.125 The expansion of rice cultivation on Java from the seventeenth century was associated with receding forests and the establishment of sedentary communities.126

As we shall see in the chapters to follow, the art of Dutch colonists in Indonesia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was even more powerfully implicated in the mission to convert nature into culture. In the colonial context, art became a medium through which to express the ideals of the Dutch ruling elite, which involved transforming and controlling Indonesian landscapes for their own benefit.

120 See Hildred Geertz (1994). Geertz developed her argument with reference to the Batuan paintings collected by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the 1930s. See also Couteau: 133. 121 Behrend: 176. 122 Giambelli: 494, 498. 123 Giambelli: 498. 124 Giambelli: 513. 125 Taylor (2003): 247. 126 Taylor (2003): 208.

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F Exchanging views: shifting modes of representing landscape in Indonesia G

Another theme that emerges in considerations of Indonesian landscape art is the complex combination of styles and meanings that were adopted from the Indic and Islamic worlds, as well as from China and Europe.127 Indonesian textiles can be read as a particularly illustrative text in this regard, one that traces (though by no means in a linear fashion) the imprint of foreign influences and their integration into Indonesian ways of seeing and representing landscape.128 Sometimes foreign rulers appropriated this text to disseminate the values of their own culture. For instance, Javanese batik made during the Japanese occupation — known as Java Baru or Hokokai batik — included exotic images like fans and women clothed in kimonos.129 More frequently, foreign influences were woven gradually into Indonesian textiles. Generally speaking, motifs with foreign origins that became widespread throughout Java were those that ‘translated’ well for indigenous populations. Those motifs with non-indigenous origins whose understanding depended on a knowledge of Chinese language and cosmology, for example, tended to remain restricted to the Chinese community.130 Further, new art styles and symbols were rarely adopted haphazardly or wholesale, but specifically in situations where they could enhance, by association, the status and prestige of the receiving culture.131 Hence, on Sumba rulers adopted the lion, a symbol of the Dutch state that circulated throughout the Indies on Dutch coins and coats of arms, as their own motif on ceremonial textiles.132 Where foreign motifs

127 Christina Sumner, ‘Tradition and synthesis: The decorative arts of Southeast Asia’ in Arts of Southeast Asia (Sydney, 2001): 23. 128 I do not go into the technical details of textile production in this section for reasons of space and fluency of argument, and therefore assume that the reader has a basic knowledge of the differences between batik, etc. Many of the references mentioned in this section include extensive discussions on the different techniques of textile manufacture. 129 See examples in Wanda Warming and Michael Gaworski, The World of Indonesian Textiles (Tokyo, New York and London, 1991): 184; see also McCabe Elliot: 2–3. 130 Maxwell: 275. 131 Taylor and Aragon: 37. 132 Warming and Gaworski: 82. Of course, the lion — an animal that is not indigenous to the Netherlands — was a foreign appropriation in Dutch symbols as well.

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like these were adopted, they were assimilated into the distinctively Southeast Asian structure and overall appearance of Indonesian textiles.133 As we shall see in the discussion of European influence on Balinese art, below, the same pattern of selective integration seems to apply to changes in other Indonesian arts as well.

In the colonial period, Chinese influence became particularly visible in the batik cloth produced on Java’s north coast, or pasisir.134 The batik produced for the Indo-Chinese community in this region had many features that distinguished it from the batik of Central Java, for instance. Chinese batik was commonly more colourful than its Central Javanese counterparts, where earthy tones predominated, because Indo-Chinese batik makers were among the first to adopt synthetic dyes to suit Chinese tastes and traditions in the late nineteenth century.135 Chinese designs were also more naturalistic, and featured motifs from real and mythical Chinese landscapes such as the dragon, dog-lion, phoenix, fish, butterfly, peony, and chrysanthemum, among others.136 Similarly, from the mid-nineteenth century Indo-Chinese and -European batik makers (whose clients came from the same ethnic groups)137 also began to use motifs from European landscapes, like the rose, tulip, lily, and iris, the latter often in the form of a fleur-de-lis.138 Interestingly, Chinese clients were often very receptive to European motifs. Chinese customers accounted for most of Eliza van Zuylen’s trade, for instance. Van Zuylen was an Indo-European batik maker who ran a workshop specialising in signed batik tulis (hand-drawn cloth) in Pekalongan between 1890 and 1946. Her designs were taken from diverse contemporary sources, such as illustrated horticultural books, postcards, European wallpaper and magazines.139

133 Maxwell: 379. 134 Maxwell: 264–5. For example, foreign patterns might be restricted to motif bands. 135 Maxwell: 267; Veldhuisen-Djajasoebrata: 21. 136 Maxwell: 264–5; Veldhuisen-Djajasoebrata: 28. Maxwell has argued, on the basis of ancient motifs that are shared in Chinese and Southeast Asian textiles, that these have a shared ancestry: see 241. 137 Veldhuisen-Djajasoebrata: 22; Elliot: 88. 138 Warming and Gaworski: 183; Maxwell: 383. 139 Elliot: 106; Maxwell; 385. Signing was usually restricted to Indo-European and -Chinese batik makers from the late nineteenth century; it was rare among indigenous makers until the twentieth century.

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The influence of Islam on Indonesian art and culture is similarly visible in textiles. The informal prohibition against depicting living things which evolved from the perception that such representations would challenge Allah’s status as supreme creator140 is detectable in the stylisation of some Indonesian motifs.141 With the arrival of Islam on Flores, for instance, images of the horse, which had previously been portrayed naturalistically, became stylised almost to the point of unrecognisability. The same trend can be traced with the abstraction of human and animal figures on Javanese batik.142 Some scholars have argued that the abstraction of figures on Indonesian textiles is not solely attributable to the influence of Islam. TE Behrend has proposed that the mode for representing human figures in Javanese wayang art stems from the indigenous tradition of stylising refined figures to demonstrate their distance from nature.143 Further, Robyn Maxwell has suggested that the dominance of geometric designs in some Indonesian textiles can be traced to ancient indigenous motifs that pre-date Indic as well as Islamic influences.144 Nor has the spread of Islam insured that the rules of stylisation are applied to the exclusion of naturalistic designs. This is even true of arts from Aceh, which bore the distinction of being the strongest Islamic Malay state in Southeast Asia during the seventeenth century,145 and which continued to identify itself strongly with Islam in later centuries.146 Manuscripts from Aceh, which usually had a religious function, were normally free of figural representations,147 but textiles sometimes continued to feature naturalistic designs.148

140 Martin Frishman and Hasan-Uddin Khan, ‘Preface’ to The Mosque: History, Architectural Development and Regional Diversity (London, 2002): 14. See also Warming and Gaworski: 168. It is important to note that this prohibition has historically by no means been uniformly applied throughout the Islamic world, partly because it is not formally prescribed in the Qur’an or in Islamic law. 141 Maxwell: 329. 142 Warming and Gaworski: 88, 169. 143 Behrend: 184–5. 144 Maxwell: 328. 145 Leonard Y Andaya, ‘Aceh’s contribution to standards of Malayness’, Archipel, 61, 2001: 37–8, 50, 63. 146 Reid (2005): 344. Aceh’s Islamic identity became particularly important during the war of resistance against Dutch expansion (1873–1903). 147 Annabel Teh Gallop, ‘An Acehnese style of manuscript illumination’, Archipel, 68, 2004: 194. 148 Robyn Maxwell provides an example of a bi (ceremonial hanging used at weddings and circumcisions) that includes floral patterns, a Buddhist swastika motif, and a burak, a mythical winged creature with a

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Throughout Indonesia birds such as the phoenix, , and hornbill remain clearly recognisable on textiles. It is possible that these representations have remained relatively naturalistic because they can be taken to symbolise the soul’s ascension to heaven.149

In some cases, Islam has had no detectable influence on the depiction of nature. Batik from Cirebon, where Chinese influence is prominent, commonly portrays features of Javanese landscapes. Among the most distinctive designs from this region are the mega mendung (rain clouds), kuniran (turmeric roots), simbar (climbing vines), patran (leaves and vines), wadasan (rocky ground), and taman arum (fragrant garden) motifs.150 Even arts from the Islamic courts of Central Java often celebrated local landscapes. Though illustration was rare in manuscripts,151 some nineteenth century court documents were richly decorated with images of animals, plants and gardens.152

It is important to recognise that rules of stylisation also determined the depiction of nature and living things in some Indic art that pre-dated the arrival of Islam. The portrayal of kings, gods and heavenly landscapes in Hindu-Buddhist sacred art was governed by strict conventions, whereas the depiction of earthly life was often distinctly indigenous in the way that it showed local landscapes and ordinary people. The pioneering Indonesian art scholar Claire Holt made this observation with respect to carvings on ancient Balinese and Hindu Javanese temples, particularly those from East Java dating from the thirteenth

woman’s head and a horse’s body that was supposed to have been Mohammad’s mount — Maxwell: plate 20, pp 22 and 329. 149 Maxwell: 330. 150 Veldhuisen-Djajasoebrata: 24–5, 27. 151 Behrend has estimated that only about one in thirty extant Javanese manuscripts include illustrations — Behrend: 177. 152 Teh Gallop and Arps: 79 and 95, respectively. The authors show and discuss a babad of the dynastic history the Sultan of Surakarta, dated 1800, copied for John Crawfurd by a court scribe, that featured floral decorations and peacocks. The same authors discuss an 1860 manual for manuscript illustration from the court of Prince Suryanegara of Yogyakarta, which shows birds, butterflies, flowers, deer, bugs, beetles, and fish in bright colours. It also depicts a garden with a pavilion and fish pond.

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century onward.153

The influence of European painting on indigenous art is perhaps one of the most contentious areas of Indonesian art history, largely because the introduction of European styles and methods accompanied other aspects of cultural colonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The origins of modern Indonesian art are particularly controversial. Much contemporary scholarship suggests that modern art in Indonesia has two historical antecedents — the work of Raden Saleh (1811–80) (who embraced European art in the mid-nineteenth century) and the work of nationalist painters (who rejected colonial art in the early twentieth century).154 There is, however, plenty of evidence to suggest that Indonesians were engaging with non-indigenous arts much earlier than the mid-nineteenth century, when Raden Saleh was active. Already in the early nineteenth century, Asians were among the workforce of draughtsmen that European scientists and explorers relied upon before photography changed the nature of image-making. William Marsden, John Crawfurd and Thomas Stamford Raffles all employed trained Asian illustrators for the images that appeared in their publications on the Indies.155 The work of these artists often went unacknowledged, particularly in Raffles’ History, which has gained notoriety for many such omissions.156 In the late nineteenth century, by contrast, some Indonesian artists became quite well known for their adeptness in methods that appealed to

153 Holt: 40, 91–2. In East Java, Holt identified what she called a more ‘indigenous’ style of carving that was influenced by local landscapes and by court poetry. 154 Holt argued that nationalist painters like S Sudjojono founded Indonesia’s modern art movement (1967: 216). More recently, an Indonesian art historian has credited Raden Saleh with introducing modern art to Indonesia: see Kusnadi, ‘Modern art’ in Mochtar Kusuma-Atmadja (ed), Streams of Indonesian Art: From Prehistory to Contemporary (, 1990): 55–6. Similarly, Adrian Vickers has recently referred to Raden Saleh as ‘Indonesia’s first modern artist’ in A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge, 2005): 165. 155 Asian artists were employed to illustrate Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1784), Raffles’ History of Java (1817), and Crawfurd’s History of the Indian Archipelago (1820) — Werner Kraus, ‘Chinese influence on early modern Indonesian art? Hou Qua: A Chinese painter in 19th century Java’, Archipel, 69, 2005: 70, 72. 156 Anthony Forge, ‘Raffles and Daniell: Making the image fit’ in C Andrew Gerstle and Anthony Milner (eds), Recovering the Orient: Artists, Scholars, Appropriations (Chur, 1994): 112, 117. Forge noted that Raffles was ‘presumed’ to have used Asian artists, whose names weren’t recorded, and that most of the plates used in his History of Java were unsigned.

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colonial audiences. One of the most frequently cited examples is the Sundanese painter Abdullah Surjosobroto (1878–1941), who produced such idyllic mainstays as sawah (wet rice field) landscapes.157 It is possible that there were countless other less well-known Indonesian painters who adopted similar styles and themes. The Museum Nusantara in Delft, for instance, holds several undated paintings by an artist named D Djajamihardja that show bamboo huts in sawah and mountain landscapes.158 The same museum holds a watercolour of a coastal view with palms and smoking mountains that was completed around 1914 by one Wirodiredjo, about whom little seems to be known.159

By the early twentieth century, indigenous artists who imitated the colonial style of representing Indies landscapes were subject to growing criticism from their more radical fellows. Those who considered themselves part of the growing nationalist movement were particularly opposed to the idealised views of Indonesian landscapes that colonial artists favoured. Indeed, the term Hindia molek — ‘beautiful Indies’, or mooi Indië in Dutch — was first used by the nationalist painter S Sudjojono (1913–86) to denigrate colonial art and its subjects.160 Unlike the term ‘impressionism’, which began its life as an academic slur against anti-establishment artists and their work before passing into its current respectable usage, mooi Indië has retained its reputation as a kitschy, imitative, conservative style of art that was out of touch both with Europe’s modern art movements and with the day-to-day reality experienced by ordinary Indonesians living under colonial rule. Sudjojono rebelled against the maxims that he encountered in the colonial school system and he, together with other like-minded indigenous artists, established Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia (Persagi), the Union of Indonesian Artists, in 1937.161 Through lectures, collective work

157 Kusnadi: 61, and the example of A Spread of Ricefields at pp 62–3. 158 See S451-3593, S 451-3594, S 451-3596, and S 3244 from the archives of the Museum Nusantara, Delft. Many thanks to Dr Pim Westerkamp for making those images and their specifications available to me in April 2004. 159 See S451-2726 from the archives of the Museum Nusantara, Delft. 160 Noted by Kusnadi: 62, but perhaps first pointed out by Holt: 165–7l. 161 A recent article by Adrienne Fast suggests that this date is in dispute: 1937 was used by Claire Holt in her seminal Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (1967). However, Fast refers to scholars who date the inception of Persagi to 1938, based on oral history collected from surviving co-founders. See Adrienne Fast,

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projects, and exhibitions held between 1938 and 1942, Persagi endeavoured to develop a culture of fine art and a distinctly Indonesian style that was independent of western tropes.162 Sudjojono’s approach found favour with President , who commissioned a painting of Mt Merapi from the artist. Later, Sudjojono turned to more radical themes: he became a communist and adopted a socialist-realist style of painting.163 (Sudjojono’s politics notwithstanding, he reputedly remained an admirer of Cézanne and Van Gogh).164

One artist who occupies an ambiguous position in Indonesian nationalist historiography is Raden Sjarief Bustaman Saleh, or Raden Saleh, as he was more commonly known. A comparison of Raden Saleh’s work with that of his European contempories, such as Antoine Payen and Abraham Salm, reveals a common interest in the kinds of idyllic, even romantic, themes that characterised the colonial art that Sudjojono and his associates would have termed mooi Indië. Saleh’s oil paintings of animal fights and hunting scenes, village vistas and volcanic eruptions were perhaps only distinguishable from the work of colonial artists in that they were often more technically proficient. Yet even in contemporary histories of Indonesia, Saleh continues to be admiringly portrayed as an early founder of the modern art movement in Indonesia, along with nationalist and post-independence painters as diverse as Sudjojono and Affandi.

Raden Saleh was born in 1811165 to a family of petty aristocrats of partly Arab descent from Central Java. As was common practice for aspiring members of the lower elite,166

‘Exaggerated enmity in early modern Indonesian painting’, http://www.asianart.com/articles/fast/index.html (accessed 10/11/06). 162 Sudarmaji, ‘Persagi’ in Mochtar Kusuma-Atmadji (ed), Streams of Indonesian Art: From Prehistory to Contemporary (Bandung, 1990): 71, 75. 163 Holt: 195–7. 164 Holt: 216. 165 The year of Saleh’s birth appears to be in dispute among his biographers (1814 is sometimes cited). I have taken the date given by Marie-Odette Scalliet in ‘ “Back to Nature” in the East Indies: European painters in the nineteenth century East Indies’ in Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics (Amsterdam, 1999): 58. 166 Marie-Odette Scalliet, ‘Raden Saleh et les Hollandais: artiste protégé ou otage politique?’, Archipel, 69, 2005: 318.

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Saleh was raised in a more elevated household than his own, that of his uncle the Regent of .167 In 1825 the young Saleh’s continuing development was entrusted to Jean Baptiste de Linge, a government accountant who would eventually serve as Inspector of Finance. Four years later Saleh joined the De Linge family on a trip to Europe168 — the beginning of a long sojourn, and of an illustrious career that would furnish him with distinguished connections and lasting fame as a painter. Saleh’s artistic talents had been nurtured as a child in the house of his uncle, and were discovered in the early 1820s by none other than Antoine Payen, the colonial government’s official painter, who recommended Saleh to King Willem I as being worthy of state patronage.169 In the Netherlands during the 1830s, Saleh was placed under the artistic tutelage of distinguished painters like and Andreas Schelfhout. His training regimen included copying seventeenth century Dutch masters like Rembrandt and Van Dijck, as well as pastoral specialists like Paulus Potter.170 The influence of this education is evident in some of Saleh’s early, more subdued paintings, such as his portrait of the Baud family (1831-2),171 which uses favourite seventeenth-century devices like the ‘keyhole’ view through the open front door and includes the family dog as a symbol of loyalty.172 It was also in the 1830s that Saleh received some of the commissions that would make him famous, among them the portrait of Governor-General Herman Willem Daendels.173

Portraiture was one of Saleh’s early mainstays, as the reproductions in Marie-Odette Scalliet’s recent article on his Hague period (1830s) illustrate.174 Saleh’s better-known

167 Harsja W Bachtiar, ‘Raden Saleh: Aristocrat, painter and scientist’, Indonesian Journal of Cultural Studies, 6(3), 1976: 34. 168 Bachtiar: 36. 169 Bachtiar: 35, 37. 170 Bachtiar: 57–9. 171 Reproduced in Scalliet (2005): 195. 172 For recent discussions of symbolism in seventeenth century Dutch painting, see RH Fuchs, Dutch Painting (London, 1996):109–16; and E de Jongh, ‘The iconological approach to seventeenth-century Dutch painting’ in Frans Grijzenhout and Henk van Veen (eds), The Golden Age of Dutch Painting in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 1999). 173 Bachtiar: 58. 174 See Scalliet (2005); also Bachtiar: 38.

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work catered to the tastes of mid-nineteenth century European audiences for the dramatic and the exotic: hence Saleh’s famed wild animal and hunting scenes, his images of volcanic eruptions and, to a lesser extent, his scenes of life in the tropics, including a Javanese village and a view of Buitenzorg.175 In 1855 Saleh also completed his first and only history painting, The Arrest of Diponegoro, which depicted the subjugation of Prince Diponegoro at the end of his career as leader of rebel forces in the Java War (1825–30).

In the thirty years he spent in Europe he had cultivated a bevy of elevated patrons, among them three Dutch kings (Willem I–III), two Grand Dukes of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Ernest I and II), and the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria.176 Saleh was more decorated than most Dutch officials in the Indies, boasting a small cache of knighthoods that had been bestowed upon him in return for gifts of paintings with regal themes (usually lions engaged in battle).177 Europe offered Saleh countless opportunities to cultivate a persona that Java would never have afforded him: in Europe, Saleh was frequently introduced as a Javanese ‘prince’, a misnomer that he apparently did little to correct.178 He was also the subject of portraits in which he appeared in a variety of guises: as a genteel painter among the tools of his craft179 and, more tellingly, as an oriental noble in opulent costume.180 He continued to move in elite circles when he returned to Java, mixing with equal aplomb among and Governors-General.181 His second wife, a high-born Javanese woman, was a relative of a close associate to the Sultan of Yogyakarta.182 Saleh advertised this connection by appearing in public with a golden payong (a ceremonial parasol normally reserved for royals), until a protocol-conscious Dutch official asked him to desist.183 Even after his

175 See Raden Saleh’s Desa Landscape (1863) and View of Kanari Avenue and the Rear Side of Buitenzorg Palace (1871). 176 Bachtiar: 39, 46. 177 Two lions fighting a bull for Willem II, a lion fight for Franz Josef — Bachtiar: 40, 47. 178 Bachtiar: 39. 179 By FCA Schreul (1840), in Kraus (2005b): 267. 180 By CJ Bähr (1841) and F Hanfstaengl (1843) in Kraus (2005b): 268 and 269 respectively. 181 In the 1860s, one of Saleh’s patrons was Hamengkubuwono VI — Bachtiar: 45. 182 Bachtiar: 53. 183 Bachtiar: 46, 54.

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humiliation in the Bekasi affair, Saleh continued to accept government sponsorship and colonial accolades, and participated in the activities of European elites: he was charged with restoring the government’s collection of paintings;184 became one of the first members of the KITLV when it was established in 1851, and a long-term subscriber to its journal;185 and was awarded honorary membership in the Batavian Academy for the Arts and Sciences — the first Indonesian to attract such distinction — in return for his diligence in collecting antique manuscripts.186

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Indonesian upper classes played an important role in integrating colonial art into elite culture. From the nineteenth century, the parlour walls of wealthy Indonesians and Chinese became sites of a novel style of consumption: European etchings and lithographs had made their way into the homes of the fashion-conscious elite.187 Indonesian rulers also extended their traditional patronage of the arts to the new styles and sources of representation that were touted by colonists. In doing this, indigenous elites to some extent shared in Dutch ambitions to have the Indies and, significantly, the position of those who ruled over its landscapes, recorded and celebrated. The royal court at Yogyakarta, Central Java, was particularly active in this pursuit.188 During the early 1920s, the artists Jan Poortenaar and Isaac Israels toured the royal courts of the region.189 Around the same time, Walter Spies began his artistic life in the Indies in Yogyakarta, where he was made bandmaster of the Sultan’s European orchestra and given a place to live in the kraton. Spies’ elite patronage continued on Bali, where he was initially maintained at the pleasure of Cokorda Sukawati, district chief of Ubud and member of a branch of the Klungkung royal family. The association was mutually beneficial. Spies was given a privileged introduction to Balinese (and colonial) society, and was able to use these connections to attract distinguished international visitors who sought him out as an ‘expert’

184 Bachtiar: 62–3. 185 Bachtiar: 67–8. 186 Bachtiar: 75–6. 187 Krause (2005a): 63. 188 Cohen: 21. 189 See Poortenaar’s observations on his time in the Central Javanese courts (1990: 72–93) On Isaac Israels in Central Java, see Anna Wagner, Isaac Israels (Amsterdam, 1969): 22.

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on Balinese culture.190 In turn, educated Europeans like Spies enhanced the uncertain status of the upstart Ubud court.191 Sukawati was able to consolidate his alliance with the Dutch, which dated from the onset of the campaign to conquer South Bali (1906–8). Rather than join the resistance that rival kingdoms at Batuan and Blahbatuh offered the Dutch, Ubud applied for protection, escaped violent subjugation, and consequently prospered under colonial rule. Indeed, the Cokorda’s successor, Cokorda Raka Sukawati (who was particularly interested in European art), became president of the shortlived Negara Indonesia Timor, the Federated State of Eastern Indonesia that the Dutch established as an attempt to retain their influence during the Revolution.192

It is perhaps worth noting that the renowned, powerful image of Indonesians removing portraits of successive Dutch Governors-General from the palace at Buitenzorg to mark the end of colonial rule193 has no known counterpart in photographs of European-style paintings being removed from the houses of indigenous elites. Nor was there much permanence to the forced expulsion of European culture from the symbolic heart of the old empire. President Sukarno continued to purchase paintings by the Bali artist Rudolph Bonnet — known for his conservative, distinctly European academic style — right up until 1958, when Sukarno expelled Dutch nationals from Indonesia and Bonnet fled to the Netherlands.194 Further, the Istana Bogor (once the Governor-General’s palace at Buitenzorg) is still home to an art collection containing sundry western-style works that were amassed by Sukarno during his tenure.195

Historians continue to grapple with ambiguities such as these in Indonesian history. The influence of European art on Indonesian culture is often deeply enmeshed in intricate

190 Hans Rhodius and John Darling, Walter Spies and Balinese Art (Amsterdam, 1980): 35, 41; Vickers (1996): 105. 191 Kam: 41–4. 192 Couteau: 17–18. See also Vickers (1996): 140. 193 I refer to the photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, taken 31 December 1949, shown in Kees Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia 1600–1950 (Amsterdam, 2002): 421. 194 Couteau: 33. 195 Vickers (1996): 181.

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processes of exchange, which are sometimes further obscured by political agendas. Nowhere is this more apparent than in studies of art on Bali, which occupies a special position in Indonesian historiography. Colonial scholars in the early twentieth century were drawn to Bali’s apparent exceptionalism. The island’s status as a Hindu enclave where painting retained a strong (but by no means dominant) and continuous cultural presence distinguished Bali from its mainly Muslim neighbours, where figural painting was comparatively rare. Bali scholars continue to debate the assumptions that colonial observers first made over the degree to which changes in modern Balinese art were attributable to European influence in the late colonial period. There seems to be consensus around the notion that the first significant influx of European artists and intellectuals in the 1920s clearly had some effect on indigenous art.196 There is also basic agreement that the commodification of Balinese culture through tourism in the post-colonial period continues to shape the development of the island’s art today.197 Where historians diverge is on finer points, such as whether indigenous art began to reflect secular themes before or after the onset of Bali’s colonial period. Some scholars have held that, traditionally, the purpose of Balinese art had been a functional one — to aid religious rituals — and that it was the influx of western alternatives in the early twentieth century that produced the modern trend toward secular art.198 Other scholars have cited examples that suggest Balinese traditional painting was already in transition when Europeans arrived. Ritual art from Kamasan, where the vast majority of Bali’s traditional-style painting is still produced, already included scenes from everyday life intermingled with images of gods in the late nineteenth century.199 Equally, the Balinese 35-day calendar (tabing plintangan) often showed scenes from the lives of commoners in its middle rows which, importantly, were never governed by the rules of representation that the aristocratic and godly themes that characterised the

196 All the authorities on Balinese art cited in this section more or less adhere to this adage in their work. 197 See, for example, Couteau: 138, who argues that contemporary Balinese painting for the tourist market generally caters to the myth of the tropical paradise. See also the general argument of Vickers in Bali: A Paradise Created (1996), where he argues that the tourist myth of Bali as paradise has its origins in the views constructed by Europeans in the early twentieth century. 198 This has been posited by Hildred Geertz (1994): 1; and Couteau: 138. 199 Cooper: 149, 157. The author uses the example of an 1890 painting attributed to I Ketut Gede of Singaraja, which includes small commoner figures in a religious painting.

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top rows.200

The influence of individual European artists, especially Walter Spies and Rudolph Bonnet, is a highly contested area of Balinese art history. Spies and Bonnet have been singled out by some historians for teaching Balinese artists to draw naturalistically and to employ linear perspective in their compositions.201 Scholars have generally qualified this observation by stating that such techniques were integrated into Balinese art without entirely replacing older preferences for two-dimensional scenes and abstract, stylised forms.202 Human figures in particular continue to appear as ‘types’ rather than as differentiated individuals, according to Jean Couteau.203 Further, in Batuan, artists retained a distinctive style of painting that used line (rather than colour or texture) to delineate form.204

Adrian Vickers has posited that the longterm influence of Walter Spies on Balinese art — largely attributable to the fame that he attained after his death — is difficult to overestimate.205 By contrast, Couteau and Kam have argued that it was Bonnet who had the most profound impact on Balinese art, for the opposite reason — that he survived the Pacific War and outlived Spies, and was therefore able to continue his association with artists on Bali.206 In 1951, Bonnet helped establish a successor organisation to Pita Maha, Golongan Pelukis Ubud, whose members were encouraged to mimic the academic style that Bonnet favoured. Later, in the mid-1970s, Bonnet was also responsible for establishing

200 Anthony Forge, Balinese Traditional Paintings (Sydney, 1978): 3. Plates 50 and 52 show an example of such a calendar from Kamasan made in the 1940s. 201 Jeannette ten Kate argued that western influence is generally noticeable in Balinese art in the use of perspective — ‘Painting in a garden of Eden: European artists in Bali during the first half of the twentieth century’, in Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics (Amsterdam, 1999): 130. Rhodius and Darling, together with Couteau, have specifically credited Spies with introducing this innovation to Balinese art — Rhodius and Darling: 31; and Couteau: 134. 202 Couteau: 135. 203 Couteau: 138. 204 Hildred Geertz (1994): 6. 205 Vickers (1996): 105, 109. 206 Kam: 48.

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Ubud’s Museum Puri Lukisan.207 The artist’s veneration in Ubud was demonstrated in 1979 when his remains were combined with those of Cokorda Agung Sukawati in a sumptuous cremation ceremony.208

In contradistinction to these arguments, some scholars have questioned the geographical extent of Spies and Bonnet’s influence, arguing that it has largely been confined to Ubud, where both artists lived.209 This is significant because, as alluded to above, Ubud had aligned itself with the Dutch conquerors and therefore welcomed Europeans to the royal court, which remained distant during the colonial period from the established centres of Balinese power and culture at Klungkung and Batuan. These were much older courts where the traditional producers of ritual art — Brahmin families — still lived in numbers.210 Further, Pita Maha — the organisation that Spies, Bonnet and others established to propagate their vision for Balinese art –– did not have far-reaching influence. At Sanur, for instance, the brothers Hans and Rolf Neuhaus, who worked as art dealers between 1935 and 1940, eschewed Pita Maha’s restrictions and carried on an independent art trade.211

Scholars have also pointed out that Ubud artists did not adopt European techniques in a wholesale act of imitation, preferring instead styles that already held currency in Balinese art. For example, Spies’ penchant for dense, decorative foliage in his paintings would have appealed to the Balinese regard for ramé in art and social life.212 Then again, the tendency toward ramé in Balinese art might be attributed to more practical limitations. Paper, an especially perishable item in the tropics, and a relatively scarce luxury before the twentieth century, may have encouraged artists on Bali (and Java) to fill their sheets for reasons of

207 Couteau: 38–40. 208 Couteau: 34. 209 Hildred Geertz (1994): 10. 210 Kam: 41–4. 211 Kam: 45. 212 Hildred Geertz (1994): 10.

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economy.213 Perhaps it was Spies who acquired the preference for crowded landscapes from Balinese art. Indeed, some scholars have argued that his elongated figures may have been based upon the fertility puppet figures called cili that are still used in Balinese rituals today. 214

F G

Landscape indisputably exists as a significant theme in Indonesian art. Indeed, analysis of this genre yields important insights into the historical relationship between Indonesians and their environment, as well as between Indonesians and foreigners. It transpires that indigenous and European elites often shared a preference for ordered landscapes, particularly gardens, and for authoritative images of themselves as rulers within these spaces. Where colonial elites differed from their Indonesian counterparts was in the accommodation of wilderness. For some indigenous elites, untamed nature provided an opportunity for spiritual fortification and was therefore crucial to narratives of kingship, holiness and legitimacy. The Dutch, with their aversion for wilderness, automatically excluded themselves from this symbolic source of power. As we shall see (in Chapter 7, for instance), at least one colonial writer, Louis Couperus, may have been aware of the fragile nature of Dutch legitimacy in the eyes of Javanese rulers and their subjects based on these diverging attitudes to nature. In his novel The Hidden Force (1900), Couperus suggested that it was the Javanese aristocracy’s command over the untamed forces of nature that endangered the stability of Dutch rule. This qualifies Boomgaard’s assertion that the conceptual division between wilderness and civilised nature did not differ radically between Indonesian and other cultures.215

213 Behrend: 179, Similarly, Garret Kam has suggested that it may have been the modern tourist’s demand for compact, easily transportable paintings from Bali, with ‘more’ crammed into the picture, that has reinforced the continuation of ramé in art — Kam: 65. 214 Kam: 46–7. 215 Boomgaard (1997): 17–18.

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However, Boomgaard’s suggestion that historians should consider class when discussing the representation of landscape in Indonesia216 has been useful in distinguishing between the experiences of commoners and elites. On the one hand, sacred landscapes and religious art were often broadly intelligible across class boundaries. Mountains, for example, were revered as homes of the gods and of rulers’ ancestors, and as places for spiritual retreat — a designation common throughout Asia. In Europe, on the other hand, mountains were generally shunned as wastelands until the late eighteenth century (see Chapter 3), an aversion that led colonists to overlook entire populations in places like Sumatra’s highlands until the late nineteenth century. In forested landscapes, ordinary Indonesians demonstrated their agreement with elite preferences for civilised landscapes through clearing land for cultivation. However, while forests may have represented a site for the trial of kings in elite discourses, such as classical Javanese poetry, for commoners the dangers of the forest were expressed in the form of taboos and frightening folk tales. Art and language functioned as discursive tools that aided in the cultural appropriation of nature, especially (but not exclusively) in elite circles. In Java, poetry as well as everyday speech linked the taming of nature with human agency. This project assumed a new urgency at the hands of European artists in the ninteenth century. As we shall see in Part II of this thesis, colonial painting was particularly instrumental in defining ideal colonial landscapes.

The influence of European painting on Indonesian culture during the colonial period was only the most recent of a series of foreign styles and systems of meaning that had affected Indonesia’s arts. In textiles, especially batik, motifs from distant landscapes like those of China and Europe were often adopted by immigrants and their Indonesianised descendants. These existed alongside stylistic conventions that emanated from the Indic and Islamic worlds, as well as from ancient indigenous customs. The historical task of separating these traditions from one another is always a delicate one, but is especially contentious with respect to identifying European influences. While recent research has resulted in some important and successful attempts to restore agency to Indonesian artists who lived and worked during the colonial period, care must be taken to avoid the ahistorical tendencies that often reside in scholarly desires to totally expunge colonial influences from Indonesian

216 Boomgaard (1997): 18 (also referred to in the introductory section of this chapter).

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art. Nowhere are the dangers of this agenda so apparent as in the project to identify the origins of modern Indonesian painting. Landscape, it seems, remains as politicised in contemporary discussions of art as it was when colonists and nationalists first contested the means by which to represent Indonesian nature in the early twentieth century.

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F Chapter 2 G

Dutch Views of Indies Landscapes

F Journeys — An overview G

The structure of this chapter is intended to map out the physical and historical movement of Dutch colonists through colonial landscapes: from their arrival at Indies harbours to journeys into the interior or out to the peripheries of Dutch geopolitical power; from early seventeenth century port settlements to the expanding frontiers of the early twentieth century. These temporal and spatial travels of Dutch colonists were the boundaries within which myriad landscapes were encountered, reflected upon, recorded and often transformed. Later chapters adopt a thematic rather than a chronological approach to source materials, discussing images of diverse landscapes that are often strewn across the archipelago and separated by decades. It is therefore important to introduce here the spatial sequence in which Dutch representations of Indies landscapes were formed, and the materials that were employed to give shape to these representations.

It is perhaps not surprising that Dutch colonists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often chose to depict their time in the Indies and their recollections of its landscapes in terms of a journey. Recollection and the historical construction that it requires often seems to encourage such a strategy. Contemporary scholars of historical Indonesian landscapes have sometimes structured their arguments around the idea of a journey through space (and time): such a device was employed, for example, by Susan Abeyasekere in her history of Jakarta1 and by Peter Worsley in his recent work on pre-modern Javanese

1 Susan Abeyasekere, Jakarta: A History (Singapore, 1987): 48. Note that Abeyasekere subsequently published under the surname ‘Blackburn’, 2 – Dutch Views of Indies Landscapes

attitudes to landscape,2 and has informed popular accounts of Dutch colonial history.3 Since the model of a journey was also ubiquitous in colonial photograph albums from the Indies, it seems fitting to adopt it here as an introduction to the way in which the Dutch interacted with and formed attitudes toward Indies landscapes.

Dutch travel writers had long employed the device of inviting their readers to accompany them on a journey. European writers often described their arrival at ports along the route to the Indies, and thereafter gave chronological accounts of other destinations on their itineraries.4 With the advent of photography in the Indies in the mid-nineteenth century, Dutch families began to assemble albums of their life in the tropics along a similar vein, adopting a narrative structure that paralleled their journey from the Netherlands to its burgeoning colonies along the equator. These albums often began with a voyage by sea, a sight of the coast, and arrival at a colonial port city, usually Batavia. From there, sundry views of diverse Indies landscapes followed, depending on the traveller’s ultimate destination and the decade in which the photographs were taken.

Dutch archives contain many such albums assembled by blijvers (long-term residents of the Indies) as well as by temporary visitors and, later, tourists. Some of these compilations were made by professional photographers with publication in mind. Feilberg’s well-known Views from Deli and the Batak Country (1869) is one such example.5 Feilberg’s album adopted a progressive narrative stucture that moved through more or less discrete

2 Peter Worsley, ‘Old myths and new approaches: advances in the interpretation of ancient religious sites in Southeast Asia’. Paper given 13–15 July 2005 at the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies and the Monash Institute, Melbourne. (With kind permission from the author). 3 See, for example, HC de Graaf, Ambon in Oude Ansichten (Zaltbommel, 1972); and Rob Nieuwenhuys, ‘Met Hollandse mail naar Indië’ in Baren en Oudgasten (Amsterdam, 1981). 4 See, for example, Jan Poortenaar, An Artist in Java and Other Islands of Indonesia (Oxford, 1990) [First published London, c 1928], cited throughout this chapter. Poortenaar also begins his narrative aboard a steamship bound for the Indies. His first six chapters are titled to reflect his itinerary, and include the headings ‘(3) Port Said’, ‘(5) Penang’, and ‘(6) Travelling in the land of the Kompenie (Company)’. His final chapters reflect the homeward journey: ‘(36) Piso Piso’, ‘(37) Singapore’, and ‘(38) Malta’. 5 Album #73, KIT Fotobureau, Amsterdam.

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chronological and spatial themes. The album begins in the town of Labuan on Sumatra’s east coast, showing images of important European buildings and the houses of planters and civil servants before moving into the countryside, past villages, jungles, Lake Toba, and the ethnographic ‘types’ (as they were often conceived by colonial photographers)6 that inhabited those landscapes.

By the late colonial period, when greater numbers of Dutch people (particularly women) were arriving in the Indies, similar albums were assembled by families and private individuals, many of them tending toward the documentation of ‘views’ and the collection of souvenirs.7 Perhaps, as Susan Sontag suggested in her treatise On Photography, there is something in the photograph itself that encourages memorialisation and nostalgia. ‘Photography’, Sontag wrote, ‘is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos … Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.’8

It is arguable that there was something about the experience of colonialism itself that encouraged such sentiments. Scholars of Dutch colonial literature have made the frequent observation that a sense of nostalgia pervaded Indies novels almost from their very inception in the mid-nineteenth century, just as they did colonial photographs. Dutch nostalgia for the colonial past did not first emerge in the post-colonial era, but was a constant feature of colonial culture in the Indies from at least the late nineteenth century. ‘Each age has its own tempo doeloe’, Rob Nieuwenhuys wrote in Baren en Oudgasten, his second photographic memoir of the Indies. ‘Tempo doeloe’, or the nostalgic colonial sense of the past, ‘was in 1880, for the novelist and journalist PA Daum, the time of 1840; for

6 See Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities (London and New York, 2000); and Elizabeth Edwards (ed), Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920 (New Haven and London, 1992). 7 As Susan Sontag observed, photography enabled the collection of ‘the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope’ — Susan Sontag, On Photography (London, 1977): 7. Many of the albums viewed at the KIT Fotobureau also fall into the narrative category. 8 Sontag: 25.

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another Indies writer like Du Perron in 1940, it was the time of 1880.’ 9

Perhaps this colonial nostalgia was attributable to improvements in international transport from the late nineteenth century, and the relative ease with which colonists were thereafter able to travel across oceans and over terrain. This, together with the relaxation of emigration laws after 1870, may have fostered a greater sense among Dutch colonists of belonging to a mobile expatriate community who expected one day to return ‘home’ (the Netherlands), and who therefore had to set about chronicling their time in the colonies almost immediately. Once the Dutch in the Indies were equipped to keep the Netherlands fixed in their memories as a homeland to return to, the Indies were preserved as a memory before they were even left behind. Its landscapes became a series of views to look at and pass through, rather than settle within and assimilate into one’s identity.10

Nostalgia perhaps forms part of the explanation for the sustained colonial interest in coastlines, which is where our survey of Dutch journeys through Indies landscapes begins. The coast was the historical basis of Dutch power in Southeast Asia, and was the site where the gradual construction of a colony was re-experienced before the eyes of every new arrival from Europe. Indies coastlines became a crucial locus of historical identity for Dutch colonists and their concept of their place in Indies landscapes, even as the interior became more familiar and modes of arrival on the shore became more advanced.

9 Rob Nieuwenhuys, Baren en Oudgasten (Amsterdam, 1998) [First published 1981]: 9. The quotation reads: ‘Elke tijd heeft zijn eigen tempo doeloe … Tempo doeloe is in 1880 voor de Indische romanschrijver en journalist PA Daum de tijd van 1840, voor een andere Indische schrijver als Du Perron in 1940 de tijd van 1880.’ See also EM Beekman, ‘Introduction’ to the English translation of PA Daum’s Ups and Downs of Life in the Indies: A novel (Periplus, 1999) [First published 1890], where Beekman reaches similar conclusions: 4. 10 On the general nature of the growing cultural distance between the Dutch and the Asian aspects of life in the Indies from the late nineteenth century, see Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison WI, 1983): 157–8; and Rudolph Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton and Oxford, 2002): 84. Mrázek noted that, because few Europeans expected to stay permanently in the Indies by the late colonial period, their dwellings became more temporary in appearance.

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The next stage of Dutch journeys through Indies landscapes encompassed colonial towns which, strictly speaking, were part of the built environment but are as unavoidable in histories of colonialism in Southeast Asia as discussions of plantations and other constructed features of the ‘natural’ environment. Beyond the colonial metropolis, it was cultivated lands that held the greatest interest for Europeans: settled agricultural vistas were associated with beauty, power and wealth in colonial representations of landscape. As the Dutch moved deeper into interior spaces, some landscapes that were once unfamiliar, notably mountain ranges, gradually became domesticated. This change in Dutch attitudes during the nineteenth century followed in the wake of improved transport and communications in the Indies, and also adhered to the general evolution of historical European attitudes toward mountains.

Some interior landscapes — notably uncultivated spaces, and jungle — remained beyond the bounds of Dutch appreciation. Wildernesses, where they did not recede in the wake of colonial agriculture and settlement, were ever associated in Dutch minds with waste, ugliness, and brutality, and with spaces that were beyond the reach of colonial control. Less tangible aspects of Indies nature, like climate and seasons, also informed Dutch views of tropical landscapes, the degree to which these could be commanded, and the extent to which Europeans felt capable of governing themselves within them.

Early in the history of modern colonial journeys, then, the opposition between perceptions of beauty/ugliness, utility/worthlessness, and control/powerlessness were established in Dutch views of Indies landscapes. These categories would be applied to certain landscapes more or less consistently throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and would help shape Dutch ideas about their place within Indies landscapes.

F Entry points — Coastlines G

From the seventeenth century, Dutch journeys to and through Indies landscapes had begun with a voyage. In the VOC period Europeans arrived on Southeast Asian shores in wooden ships — the famed East Indiamen — at the mercy of sometimes fickle winds. In the early 81 2 – Dutch Views of Indies Landscapes

eighteenth century, on average it took seven months to sail between the Netherlands and the East Indies.11 By the nineteenth century steam-powered ships had begun to frequent Southeast Asian ports. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, passengers aboard steamships like those of the Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij (Royal Packet Voyage Company, or KPM) fleet were able to enjoy the fastest voyages to the Indies in history.12 Early twentieth century postcards of KPM steamers suggest that these vessels were fondly regarded by colonial travellers as vehicles closely associated with the journey eastward.13 Changes in the technology of sea travel notwithstanding, when the last generations of Dutch colonists sailed into Indies harbours in the early twentieth century, they were replicating a first experience of Indies landscapes that had remained remarkably consistent over the centuries. Coastlines — the foreign entry (and departure) point to the Indies — were a recurring feature of Dutch journeys through Indies landscapes.

Around 1606, shortly after the VOC had been founded, a view of Amsterdam as the centre of the world was painted on the cover of a harpsichord intended for the use of Amsterdam’s city organist.14 The panel is now held in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, and serves as a reminder of Dutch views of their city as the hub of a wealthy, expanding maritime empire based on trade. Beyond the classical figures that represented the city itself lay a Dutch East Indiaman and the riches that it brought to Amsterdam. The world was outlined in a map that showed the Indies, together with various icons of distant exoticism, including a mosque and a Hindu temple. Seventeenth century Dutch visions of their position in the world portrayed domestic coastlines as the centre of power and prosperity, not only in paintings

11 Abeyasekere: 19. 12 Steamshipping surpassed wind-powered shipping in Singapore only two years after the opening of the Suez Canal. The KPM’s first contract was awarded in 1890, and the company was explicitly charged with expanding Dutch shipping in the archipelago. See Eric Tagliacozzo, ‘Hydrography, technology, coercion: Mapping the sea in Southeast Asian imperialism, 1850–1900’, Archipel, 65, 2003: 94–5. 13 See the postcards in de Graaf: 28–9. See also the postcards in Leo Haks and Steve Wachlin, Indonesia: 500 Early Postcards (Singapore, 2004): 30, 52, 104. 14 See image and comments on ‘Amsterdam as the centre of the world’ by Pieter Isaacz (c 1606–7), in Marleen Dominicus-Van Soest, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam: The Masterpieces Guide (Amsterdam, 2003): 34-5.

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of Amsterdam, but in images of other Dutch ports, from Enkhuizen to Rotterdam.15 Marine paintings were popular in Dutch homes, where they ‘mirrored the prosperity, aspirations, and values of seventeenth century Holland’.16 Indeed, the Dutch Republic boasted the largest merchant marine in the world during this period, and unlike their European fellows most Dutch people lived from trade rather than agriculture.17

For all the adventurism that characterised seventeenth century Dutch expansionism, marine art from this period was very often painted from the parochial perspective of a viewer standing on a beach and looking out to sea. Battles were frequently painted from the shore. Even shipwrecks, a common occurrence in the seventeenth century, were shown from the coast.18 Only the glittering port cities were viewed from the water, the better to display their impressive profiles and glorious merchant fleets.19 The standard view of the world for seventeenth century artists, then, was one that began on the shores of the Dutch Republic, from where all wealth and power emanated. Domestic landscapes — Dutch landscapes — always lay at the viewer’s back.

This perspective was maintained with striking consistency in paintings that showed Dutch ships venturing abroad. An anonymous engraving entitled The Battle of Bantam (1601) provides an excellent example of how the Dutch represented their early maritime exploits in Asia [Plate 1]. In the bottom left-hand corner of the picture the engraver included a map to help his viewers geographically locate the site of the conflict. Rather than follow the convention that modern viewers are accustomed to, where Europe is placed along the top edge of a world map, this seventeenth century chart mimicked the perspective of a sailor on board a Dutch vessel departing for Java from Europe. The Cape of Good Hope juts out from the bottom edge of the map. Adjacent to it lies an inverted Sumatra, its northwestern

15 For a survey of grand port city views (among more strictly marine paintings) from the seventeenth century, see George S Keyes, Mirror of Empire: Dutch Marine Art of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1990). 16 Keyes: 1. 17 Charles K Wilson, ‘A new Republic’ in George S Keyes, Mirror of Empire: Dutch Marine Art of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1990): 38–9. 18 See, for example, Jan Porcellis, Shipwreck on a Beach (1631) in Keyes: 133. 19 See, for example, Ludolph Backhuyzen, Shipping Before Amsterdam (1666), in Keyes: 91.

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extremity pointing southeast, the way it would have ‘appeared’ to a ship’s crew approaching from southern Africa. The action itself takes place among a fray of ships with cannon firing in the foreground, while the undulating coastline of northwestern Java forms the distant backdrop. The engraving therefore encourages a view of the Indies from the perspective of a Dutchman on board ship, or perhaps an observer peering over a sailor’s shoulder.

Writing in the first half of the twentieth century, the eminent Indonesianist JC van Leur noted, in a peculiarly visual evocation, the tendency for Dutch observers throughout the colonial period to employ rigidly Eurocentric perspectives: ‘[W]ith the arrival of ships from western Europe,’ Van Leur stated, ‘the point of view is turned a hundred and eighty degrees and from then on the Indies are observed from the deck of a ship, the ramparts of the fortress, the high gallery of the trading house.’20 Several generations of scholars since Van Leur (not to mention Van Leur himself) have worked to correct such lopsided perspectives of Indonesian history. Historians have largely overlooked the literal truth, however, of Van Leur’s insightful observation that, for three and a half centuries, the importance of Indies coastlines remained paramount in Dutch colonial minds, and the distinctive practice of viewing landscapes as though seen from the helm of a ship was consistently maintained.

Many of the earliest and most beautiful images of the Indies were maps of its coastlines. Such maps, which are discussed at some length in Chapter 3, frequently combined the elements of topographical surveying with the techniques of landscape painting. Indeed, seventeenth century cartographers and painters received very similar training, and the work of both groups was deemed equally worthy of display.21 ‘Mapscapes’, as I shall be refering to these images, were often commissioned by the VOC, and consequently privileged Dutch interests in Southeast Asian landscapes: fortresses, lucrative cultivars, and European shipping were frequently emphasised, while interior landscapes were minimised or only

20 JC van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (The Hague, 1967): 261. More recently, Thomas Suárez in his Early Mapping of Southeast Asia (Singapore, 1999) included a chapter entitled ‘The view from the deck: early European maps’. 21 See Chapter 3.

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vaguely referred to because the Dutch were unfamiliar with them. Coastlines were carefully traced with an eye to providing navigational information, and the perspective adopted was always one of looking from the sea toward the shore, sometimes from an elevated vantage point. Early Indies views by Dutch artists, then, often employed the reverse of the perspective adopted toward domestic landscapes.

While clearly a superficial view of Indies landscapes, VOC images properly reflected the coastal basis of early Dutch territorial power in the region. As we have seen in the previous chapter, some scholars have argued that Indonesian centres of power and wealth were often (though not exclusively) located in interiors. By contrast, the locus of early Dutch influence in the Indies was curiously inverted, stretching along the archipelago’s island rims and in some cases, sceptical of the very existence of alternative inland authorities.22

In Maluku, where the fabled ‘spice islands’ of Ambon and Banda were located, Dutch traders conquered pre-existing Asian and Portuguese coastal bases before ousting their rivals and attempting to enforce a spice monopoly. Dutch trading posts in the region began as consciously outward-focused, functioning as distribution centres and bases from which to launch further campaigns. The position of the spice islands at the eastern extremity of regional trade was soon acknowledged to be impractical, however, and the VOC shifted its focus to the more centrally-positioned Java. Batavia, which was to become the colonial capital, was established there in 1619.23 However, up until the eighteenth century, the Dutch effectively governed only the north coast and the western hinterlands of the island. Overland transport remained arduous during this time, with sea links sustaining the most traffic.24 It was not until after 1830 that Central Java, the symbolic and geographical heart of the island, was nominally subjugated. Dutch knowledge of and interest in the landscapes beyond the coastlines of other islands in the archipelago developed even later. Sumatra’s interior long remained a mystery to the Dutch. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the

22 Jane Drakard, A Kingdom of Words: Language and Power in Sumatra (Oxford and New York, 1999): 11, 153, 223–4. See also Chapter 1. 23 MC Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia Since c 1200 (Basingstoke, 2001): 34–5. 24 Abeyasekere: 42–3.

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wilderness here was ‘thought to commence just a few miles from shore.’25 Even the plantations that were established in the 1860s were initially restricted to the lowlands of the east coast. On Bali, though the Dutch had secured a foothold in the north during the second half of the nineteenth century, it was not until 1908 that the remainder of the island was brought under colonial rule. Further, in keeping with the traditional modus operandi of colonial power in the region, the subjugation campaign was launched not from land bases, but from the beach at Sanur on Bali’s east coast.

Dutch painters, draughtsmen, and photographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries memorialised the coastal landscapes that formed the historical geo-political framework of the colonial state. Though many Europeans travelled through or lived in hinterlands, few could resist referring to the legacy of VOC mapscapes in their representations of the coast. In the mid-nineteenth century, images of disparate colonial port cities like Ambon (Maluku), Makassar (Sulawesi/Celebes), and (West Sumatra) continued to foreground clusters of Dutch ships among smaller Asian ships, anchored before European-style townships (dotted with palms to demonstrate that this was the tropics), with perhaps a shadow of distant mountains behind.26

Nowhere was the colonial penchant for the coast more strongly established than in representations of Maluku,27 particularly Ambon and Banda Neira, two miniature

25 These are the words of EM Beekman, discussing colonial perceptions of wilderness during FW Junghuhn’s time in ‘Junghuhn’s perception of Javanese nature’, Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies, 17(1–2), 1996: 135. 26 See plates reproduced in John Bastin and Bea Brommer, Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia (Utrecht, 1979): Plate 124 — De Reede van Padang (The Beach at Padang) by P Lauters after CWM van de Velde in Gezichten uit Neerlands Indie (Views from the Netherlands Indies) (Amsterdam, 1843–5); Plate 135 — Gezicht op het Fort en de Stad van Amboina 1847 (View of the Fort and the Town of Amboina 1847) by CW Mieling after LJ van Rhijn in Reis door den Indischen Archipel, in het Belang der Evangelische Zending (Journey through the Indian Archipelago, in the Interest of the Evangelical Mission) (Rotterdam, 1849–51); Plate 136 — Gezicht op Makassar (View of Makassar) from C van der Hart’s Reize Rondom het Eiland Celebes en naar Eenige der Moluksche Eilanden, Gedaan in den Jaar 1850 (Journey Around the Island Celebes and to Several Moluccan Islands, Undertaken in the year 1850) (The Hague, 1853) 27 In Dutch, ‘de Molukken’. Maluku is often still given in English as ‘the Moluccas’.

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archipelagos with a lengthy history of Dutch colonisation. The first non-Asian foreigners to settle in Maluku were the Portuguese, who dominated the European spice trade for most of the sixteenth century.28 The Dutch, eager to gain their share of the trade, made the Banda islands29 the destination of their second expedition to the Indies in 1599. and mace from Banda and cloves from Ambon became the principal source of the VOC’s wealth in Asia during the first decades of the seventeenth century. A Dutch-controlled monopoly was enforced on these islands in 1652, after an oversupply of spices on the European market resulted in declining prices.30 When local rulers refused to guarantee exclusive supplies to VOC traders, the Dutch responded by destroying excess trees (and resistant populations) and restricting the cultivation of cloves and nutmeg to Ambon and Banda respectively. The monopoly was never completely successful, since it was impossible to police the cultivation of trees throughout the archipelago and Asian merchants often used trade routes unfamiliar to the VOC.31 Nevertheless, the Dutch managed to extract a healthy profit from the spice venture. In the late eighteenth century, when the spice trade (and the VOC) was already in decline, the alone still generated over a million guilders in profit per annum.32

Even though the spice islands offered VOC merchants lucrative economic opportunities, Maluku remained ‘a peripheral outpost, even a place of exile’33 in Dutch minds, according to Leonard Andaya — a view that was perhaps reflected in the preference for a new capital on Java. Certainly, many Dutch spice-growers, or perkenieren, settled permanently in Maluku. But, as we shall see, the tendency for Europeans to view Maluku as hopelessly antipodean was reflected in the superficial views of its landscapes which, in contrast to other places of lengthy European settlement like Java, remained largely restricted to the

28 Leonard Y Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (Honolulu, 1993): 56. 29 Consisting of Banda Neira, Lonthor, Run, Ai, Rozengain, Gunung Api. 30 Ricklefs: 75. 31 Andaya (1993): 201, 205. 32 Willard A Hanna, Indonesian Banda: Colonialism and its Aftermath in the Nutmeg Islands (Philadelphia, 1978): 85. 33 Andaya (1993): 45.

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outward-oriented coast. By the late nineteenth century, the relative importance of spices in the Netherlands Indies economy had drastically declined.34 Export volumes had decreased in part due to competition from growers elsewhere35 and Banda actually became a drain on colonial finances, particularly the garrison that was maintained at Fort Belgica.36 The Dutch monopoly on the spice trade, which had been carried on by the colonial government since the VOC’s dissolution, officially ended during this period.37 By the 1890s places like Banda had become, in the apt words of Rob Nieuwenhuys, een dode stad (‘a dead town’).38

Significantly, the economic and political diminution of Maluku throughout the nineteenth century failed to effect a parallel decline in Dutch consciousness of the region. On the contrary, Ambon and Banda Neira remained popular destinations for travelling colonists throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.39 These islands were, after all, associated with the glory days of the VOC’s maritime exploits. Ambon in particular was etched in colonial memory as the inspiration for some of the great texts that formed the cornerstones of Dutch colonial literature, such as Georg Everhard Rumphius’ D’Amboinsche Rariteitkamer (1705) (The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet) and Het Amboinsch Kruidboek (1697) (The Ambonese Book of Herbs, or ‘The Herbal’),40 as well as François Valentijn’s Oud en Nieuw Oost Indiën (1724–6) (some of which was

34 The economic historian Jan OM Broek, writing in the early 1940s, noted that ‘it appears certain that the Moluccas will never again play a major role in the world market’ because of their relative lack of arable land, their distance from major shipping routes, and the boom in the Outer Islands, where demand for petroleum, oil and rubber, among other products, rapidly expanded in the first half of the twentieth century — Jan OM Broek, Economic Development of the Netherlands Indies (New York, 1942): 42, 50. 35 Hanna: 116. 36 Hanna: 114–5, 120. The spice profits sometimes failed to cover the cost of maintaining the garrison. 37 Hanna: 116. The dissolution of the spice monopoly was officially effected by 1873. 38 Rob Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies: A History of Dutch Colonial Literature (Amherst, 1982): 83. 39 Hanna: 117. 40 EM Beekman has discussed at length the legacy of Rumphius’ work in his ‘Introduction: Rumphius’ Life and Work’ in The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet by Georgius Everhardus Rumphius (New Haven and London, 1999).

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plagiarised from Rumphius).41

The visual record of Maluku left by Dutch artists and photographers similarly concentrated on the former glory of coastally-based colonial settlements. In the mid-1820s the scientific expeditions of CGC Reinwardt encompassed the islands of Eastern Indonesia. These were vividly memorialised by the draughtsmen who accompanied the expedition, among them AJ Bik (1790–1872) and Antoine Payen (1792–1853). Payen made sundry drawings and paintings of Banda and Ambon, all of which skimmed the coastlines of these islands in a narrow arc that followed the trajectory of Dutch interests in the region, focussing on colonial settlements, Dutch vessels in Maluku’s harbours, and the fortresses that had once defended Dutch bases against both European and Asian rivals. The mountainous hinterland often looms large over coastal townships in these images, but it always remains vague and distant, carefully counterbalanced by an equivalent extent of ocean dotted with European ships. A view of Ambon completed by Payen in 1824 provides a case in point [Plate 2]. The view shows Fort Victoria and the town of Ambon in the midground. In the foreground, Payen alludes to the ‘other’ part of Ambon’s history that was marginalised (in colonial minds) by the rise of Dutch power in the region. A few local men visit the tomb of an eminent ancestor, perched on a hill overlooking the coast. The grave is confined to the hinterland, physically and symbolically removed from the nexus of colonial power on the coast.42

So intent was Payen on (re)capturing the historic coasts of Maluku for posterity that in one

41 Andaya (1993): 20. Valentijn had also never been to North Makuku, relying upon information by Governor Robertus Padtbrugge to describe it. 42 Marie-Odette Scalliet, Antoine Payen: Peintre des Indes Orientales (Leiden, 1995): plate 42. See more generally the images in this collection of Payen’s work, all completed in or around 1824: Plate 34 — A very similar perspective of Ambon, this time with no tomb; Plate 38 — Gunung Api, Lontar, Fort Belgica, and the township of Banda Neira, all encompassed in one arc; Plate 35 — Another image of Banda. See also J Terwen-De Loos, Nederlandse Schilders en Tekenaars in het Oost, 17de–20ste eeuw (Amsterdam, 1972): 56 — Gezicht op de Rede van Ternate (View of the Beach at Ternate), showing the fortress Oranje and the township of Ternate. The smaller mountain to the right of Tidore in the middle was Maitara, named (rather fancifully) Norwegen (Norway) by the Dutch.

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image he managed to depict a survey of Tidore and Halmahera, appearing as distant mounds arousing from the sea, viewed from the shore of Tidore.43 Similar views that foregrounded European shipping and privileged the coast had been produced earlier in the nineteenth century by British draughtsmen such as William Daniell (1769–1837), whose work was later published in Stamford Raffles’ History of Java (1817). Payen’s fellow draughtsman, AJ Bik, produced similar coastal images that were still in circulation in the mid-nineteenth century as lithographs in published albums.44

In the second half of the nineteenth century, when photography began to flourish in the Indies, images of Maluku remained stranded, as it were, on the coast [Plate 3].45 The Dutch emphasis on coastal settlements suggests an emptiness in the hinterland that was not an accurate reflection of reality. True, many Malukans lived on the fertile coast, where frequent volcanic activity had provided rich soils. The colonial government also found it more convenient to control coastal populations, and consequently encouraged migration from the hinterland. This was where most Malukans still lived in the nineteenth century,46 contrary to the views suggested by Dutch observers. When Europeans did portray mountain people like the so-called ‘Alfuru’, it was rarely in their own habitat and often in staged

43 Scalliet (1995): plate 45. 44 Bastin and Brommer: Plate 8 — View of the Island of Banda-Neira (1811) shows Gunung Api, belching smoke, looming over the coastal township and the citadel perched high on the opposite hill; Plate 81 — AJ Bik’s Bandasche Eilanden (The Banda Islands), which appeared as a lithograph by GJ Bos in Reis naar het Oosterlijke Gedeelte van den Indischen Archipel, in het Jaar 1821; door CGC Reinwardt (Journey to the Eastern Parts of the Indian Archipelago, in the Year 1821: by CGC Reinwardt) (Amsterdam, 1858). 45 See the following photographs taken by the studio of Woodbury and Page — Ternate looking toward Tidore (1860s), in Rob Nieuwenhuys, Komen en Blijven (Amsterdam, 1982): 80. The view follows Ternate’s coastal road and the narrow strait between it and Tidore; Banda township with Gunung Api in the background (c 1875), in Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk, Het Indië Boek (Zwolle, 2001): 435; A photograph taken from Lontor looking toward Gunung Api and Banda Neira (1868) and a photograph, taken in the same year, of Kota Ambon from Batu Merah, in Steve Wachlin, Woodbury & Page, Photographers: Java (Leiden, 1994): 135 and 139 respectively. 46 Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 437, 462.

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poses that emphasised their primitiveness and savagery,47 a view that was also maintained in literature.48

Changes in technology, then, brought few modifications to the perspective that Dutch colonists adopted toward coastal landscapes. On the contrary, aerial photographs from the 1930s and 1940s represented a complete reversion to the birds’-eye views that had been so popular among cartographers in the seventeenth century.49 Visually, colonial image-makers had come full circle, their views suggesting that in Maluku, at least, little had changed since the arrival of the Dutch three centuries before. Perhaps that was the intention. As we shall see, Dutch colonial artists were ever disposed toward producing reassuring images of historically continuous, peaceful Indies landscapes. In colonial paintings and photographs of Maluku, the islands were rarely shown as anything more than narrow strips of coastline centred around townships, or else as discrete land masses viewed from a distance.

Such a view of Maluku was also maintained in colonial literature, as ’s (1905-91) semi-autobiographical The Last House in the World (1939) demonstrates. The story takes place on the island of Buru west of Ceram where, loosely following events from Vuyk’s own life, the female protagonist and her husband undertake to revive his family’s kayuputih oil concession.50 Much of the island is mountainous, and little was known of its interior by Europeans until a late nineteenth century expedition.51 Vuyk located most of the story’s events on the island’s shores, where she explicitly stated herself to be more comfortable,

47 See Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 446 — A photograph by an unknown observer of ‘An Alfuru from Ceram’ (c 1910). It shows a man (in a studio) clad in traditional warrior dress with weapons. 48 See Maria Dermoût, The Ten Thousand Things (New York, 1958): 74, in which ‘the Alfuru’ were regarded with suspicion because of their grisly talismans. 49 See the photographs in JR van Diessen and RPCA Voskuil, Boven Indië (Purmerend, 1993). Nieuwenhuys also includes an aerial view of Banda Neira in Komen en Blijven: 82. 50 Kayuputih oil was derived from the small bushes that grow from the root system of an eponymous tree. The oil was used throughout the Indies for medicinal purposes and was also exported to Europe before being superceded by Eucalyptus oil — See EM Beekman’s notes to Two Tales of the East Indies (Amherst, 1983): 179. 51 Beekman (1983): 178–9.

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having escaped Java’s confining mountain ranges.52 Vuyk grew up in the ship-building district of Rotterdam, and continued to live on a houseboat when she returned to the Netherlands in 1958.53 She seems therefore to have associated her life on Buru’s coast with the landscapes that she was familiar with from childhood, and with freedom (which is ironic given that the regime would use Buru as a prison for political dissidents from 1967).54 Indeed, though eventually appreciative of Buru’s harsh beauty, in her novella Vuyk recounted her desperate search for analogies to the Netherlands upon her arrival in Maluku. When she first passes Tanjung Karbouw (the high capes that frame the entrance to Buru’s harbour) she likens it to ‘a Dutch dike, somewhere between Arnhem and Nijmegen on a warm drizzly afternoon in August’.55

F Heartlands — Colonial towns G

Coastlines, then, were landscapes that were very dear and familiar to the Dutch in the Indies. For centuries remote shores had been the views that first materialised before the eyes of Dutch passengers aboard European ships. These were also the landscapes that hosted the first substantial settlements of Europeans. Colonial cities were heartlands turned inside out, geographically peripheral and often far removed from the locus of indigenous centres of power concentrated further inland. One particular entrepot served as the gateway to the Indies — Batavia, the colonial capital. European ships anchored in the ‘roads’ of Batavia (the oft-depicted bay where the River emptied into the Java Sea) until the late nineteenth century. It was not until 1886 that the entry point for Europeans moved east to Tanjung Priok, where heavy shipping was better accommodated than in the shallow, silted waters of . From here, new arrivals travelled by train into the town of

52 Vuyk described living ‘squeezed in a ring of mountains. I have escaped from their coercion forever and I shall look every day now across this living, vivacious water.’ — Beb Vuyk (1939), The Last House in the World, which appears in EM Beekman, Two Tales of the East Indies (Amherst, 1983): 30. 53 Beekman (1983): 6. 54 Jean Gelman Taylor, Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (New Haven and London, 2003): 360. 55 Vuyk: 28.

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Batavia itself.56 It was here that the Dutch population was concentrated and constantly renewed, and where the founding of the Netherlands Indies empire was publicly memorialised in the European population and architecture of the city. For nineteenth and early twentieth century colonists, Batavia and other large colonial cities like Surabaya, Semarang, and Bandung (which is, in fact, inland), were the focus of European orientation in Southeast Asia: their poort (‘gate’) into — and out of — Indies landscapes.

Batavia (contemporary Jakarta) has inspired several fine historical studies, among them Jean Gelman Taylor’s Social World of Batavia (1983) and Susan Abeyasekere’s Jakarta: A History (1987). Scott Merrillees’ photographic history of Batavia57 and the essays included in Jakarta-Batavia (2000)58 represent more recent journeys into the city’s past. These histories draw a portrait of a Dutch city built upon the foundations of an Asian township and of spaces, both public and private, shared with Asian peoples. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Dutch emigrants to the Indies fashioned landscapes that reminded them of the cities they had left behind. Both Batavia and Ambon were initially built following the ‘herringbone’ pattern that had characterised cities in the provinces of Holland and Utrecht since the eleventh century — that is, long lots fronting onto a waterway from which buildings were accessible.59 Land was reclaimed from the shallow sea, tributaries of the Ciliwung River diverted or straightened, canals constructed, warehouses deposited along their banks, and gabled houses erected.60 Early European visitors to Batavia often noted with amusement the city’s similarity to Dutch towns — including (rather

56 After 1871, that is — Abeyasekere: 48–9, 53. 57 Scott Merrillees, Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs (Surrey, 2000). 58 Kees Grijns and Peter JM Nas (eds), Jakarta-Batavia: Sociocultural Essays (Leiden, 2000). 59 Kees Zandvliet, Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans and Topographic Paintings and their Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion During the 16th and 17th Centuries (Amsterdam, 2002): 154, 202, 260. 60 See Pieter van der Brug, ‘Unhealthy Batavia and the decline of the VOC in the eighteenth century’ in Kees Grijns and Peter JM Nas (eds), Jakarta-Batavia: Sociocultural Essays (Leiden, 2000): 45. See also Merrillees (2000), above, who includes many images of Batavian canal zones that show land reclaimed from the sea: 25, 34–5. Merrillees discusses the straightening of the section of the Ciliwung that ran through Batavia in the seventeenth century, when many of the canals were also dug: 51, 144.

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uncharitably) its low-lying, swampy location.61 Many of the city’s canals were filled during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a bid to improve sanitation and dispel malaria.62

The European topography of VOC Batavia notwithstanding, it was during this period when its Dutch inhabitants lived most like the Asians among whom they had planted themselves. Company men married indigenous or Indo-European women, raised their children in Asian households, patronised local arts, and often adopted the sumptuary accoutrements of Asian rulers.63 VOC-era drawings reflect civic pride in the Dutch character of important buildings, but they also demonstrate a curiosity for the way that Asians lived and built in the city.64 It was not until the nineteenth century, when wealthy European Batavians moved to the leafy, spacious southern suburbs of the capital, that Dutch attitudes began to change. Their relocation geographically reinforced the growing social distance between Dutch colonists and the Asians who remained in the sweltering city. After the British interregnum (1811–16) new European arrivals in Batavia were, more so than previous generations of colonists, ‘deeply conscious of living in an alien land’65 as a consequence of this self- imposed apartheid.

Photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century attest to the growing physical and cultural distance between European and Asian Batavians. Photographers pointed their lenses at those parts of Batavia’s landscape that were of most interest and familiarity to wealthy European and, to a lesser extent, Chinese patrons. Such images of Batavia appeared soon after the advent of photographic techniques in the 1840s66 but did not attract

61 Victor R Savage, Western Impressions of Nature and Landscape in Southeast Asia (Singapore, 1984): 163. 62 Merrillees: 71. 63 Taylor (1983): 45, 79. 64 See the eighteenth century engravings of European buildings by Johannes Rach in Kees Zandvliet, ‘ from Batavia’ in The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 1600–1950 (Amsterdam, 2002) In the same volume see also the two plates on pages 62–3, for images of Asian parts of Batavia. 65 Taylor (1983): 130. 66 Merrillees: 254–5.

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a substantial market until as late as the 1860s.67 Eventually, many of these photographs came from the studio of Woodbury and Page, which was established in Batavia in 1857. Walter Woodbury and James Page had met on the gold fields of Victoria (Australia) in the 1850s and, finding no luck there, decided they would try their hand at photography, something Woodbury had discovered a talent for.68 The greatest public demand was initially for portraits. These were rather expensive, starting at 20 guilders in the mid- nineteenth century69 — a price that excluded all but the most well-to-do patrons. Indeed, the studio initially operated out of a house in the exclusive suburb of Weltevreden.70 Having established themselves, Woodbury and Page were able to open a studio in Surabaya in 1864, hire staff from Europe, and travel through the Indies to take more photographs.71 Later, ownership of the firm passed into other hands. A studio opened in Amsterdam in 1888, at the same time that the firm’s fortunes were beginning to decline due to increased competition from other photographers.72

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the studios of Woodbury and Page produced some of the best known and most numerous images of the Indies, most from a distinctly European perspective that catered to the tastes of relatively wealthy private individuals.73 The photographs of Woodbury and Page and of other late nineteenth century studios produced a plethora of images of grand European homes enclosed within fenced gardens, positioned along the spacious, tree-lined boulevards and canals of the southern suburbs [Plate 4].74 These districts were built in the 1730s, when Europeans first began to exit the

67 Merrillees: 257. The oldest known photos of Batavia were by produced Woodbury and Page, but these were not originally intended for sale (portraits were more popular). It wasn’t until the 1860s that Walter Woodbury began to advertise views of Batavia. 68 Wachlin: 9–10. 69 Wachlin: 13. 70 Wachlin: 11. 71 Wachlin: 15–16, 21, 24. 72 Wachlin: 7, 24, 28–9. 73 Wachlin: 7, 25. 74 See Merrillees (2000) for the following categories — Houses: 104, 169, 221, 223; Residential streets and canals: 166, 175; Gang Scott and Tanah Abang: 272.

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hot, crowded, malarial old city around Sunda Kelapa.75 Imposing buildings were also memorialised. The ‘palace’ on the Waterlooplein that was begun for Herman Willem Daendels and completed in 1828, and that later served as a post office, supreme court house, and now the Ministry of Finance, provides a case in point.76

The same colonial interests are mirrored in nineteenth century photographs of Kota Ambon, which showed the town’s grandest old boulevard, the Olifantstraat, lined with shady trees, ‘herenhuizen en kantooren’ (gentlemen’s houses and offices).77 They also show the architectural pillars of the European community in the centre of the town: a Grote Kerk (Great or Main Church), the European club (on Ambon, the Concorde), the police station and council headquarters, the military hospital, prison and post office.78 The kampung, or indigenous ‘village’, was largely marginalised in favour of images of Dutch parts of the city and, to a lesser extent, of the bustling, exotic Chinese quarters.79 Indigenous suburbs, where poverty and overcrowding made for less photogenic city portraits, were only distantly alluded to. In Kota Ambon, HJ de Graaf’s collection of photographs includes an image of Kampung Batu Gantung, a settlement on the outskirts of town that the photographer approached but would not take the viewer into [Plate 5]. The kampung is shown as little more than a patch of darkness across a bridge peopled with loitering natives who look as though they have been asked to pose en masse for the camera.80 It is the only image of its kind in De Graaf’s book and yet, as Rudolph Mrázek has noted, such ‘streetless’ native quarters were ubiquitous beyond the neighbourhoods frequented by the Dutch.81 It was here that an urban calamity seemed to be brewing which, in the late nineteenth century, began to replace former Dutch fears of the wilderness that had once

75 Merrillees: 95. 76 Merrillees: 190, 192. 77 De Graaf: 54–5. 78 De Graaf: 26, 41–58. 79 Rob Nieuwenhuys shows many such images of Batavia in his four ‘albums’, Tempo Doeloe (1961), Baren en Oudgasten (1981); Komen en Blijven (1982); and Met Vreemde Ogen (1988). Merrillees (2000) also includes a picture of , the Chinese quarter of Batavia: 83. 80 De Graaf: 62. 81 Mrázek: 67.

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resided in the ommelanden (environs) of Batavia. By the end of the colonial period, the wild edges of the city had assumed a distinctly urban guise in Dutch colonial consciousness. The growing population of impoverished Eurasians who had been unable to claim their place among the wide boulevards of the respectable suburbs occupied a particularly unruly space in bourgeois conceptions of the city.82

F Interiors — Filling the blanks G

The first steps inward

When Batavia was still a fledgling entrepot bordered by palm groves, fishponds and tiger- infested forests, the interior began for most Dutch colonists just beyond the last buildings of the township.83 Maps are once again instructive on this point. A VOC chart of Java produced as late as 1765 showed a densely-labelled west and north coast, while large areas in the centre of the island remained blank.84 Indeed, the VOC had only recently acquired strongholds in East Java, and continued to restrict most of its activities to the west and north coast, and to Maluku.85 Even in the diminutive ‘spice islands’, the first Dutch traders were unfamiliar with inland topographies. The oldest known VOC painting, the Birds’-Eye

82 On colonial concerns over impoverished urban Eurasian populations, see the extensive work of Ann Laura Stoler, especially ‘Making empire respectable: The politics of race and sexual morality in 20th-century colonial cultures’ in Jan Breman (ed), Imperial Monkey Business: Racial Supremacy in Social Darwinist Theory and Colonial Practice (Amsterdam, 1990); and ‘Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34(3), 1992: 532–3. See also Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies 1900–1942 (Amsterdam, 1995): 112. Gouda posits that ‘pauperism’ in the Indies was associated almost exclusively with Eurasians. 83 See Peter Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600–1950 (New Haven and London, 2001): 65, 71, on tigers in the outskirts of Batavia. He notes that tigers were considered a real problem in West Java from the seventeenth until the early nineteenth centuries. See also Taylor (1983): 19– 20; and Abeyasekere: 23. 84 Zandvliet (2002a): 151–2. 85 Ricklefs: 123.

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View of Ambon (1617) [Chapter 3, Plate 3] attributed to David de Meyne, attenuated the island’s mountainous interior into a series of gentle hills.86 The interior of other, larger islands remained relatively unknown to the Dutch until the nineteenth century. An 1874 map of Sumatra, for instance, referred imprecisely to the mountainous interior and represented Lake Toba as one-tenth of its actual size.87

From Batavia, the first tentative European (and Chinese) steps inward were taken toward the ommelanden in the seventeenth century, where farming opportunities, particularly sugar cultivation, beckoned.88 Indeed, until the early twentieth century, access to new lands for commercial agriculture and natural resource extraction remained the major incentives for Dutch colonial expansion in the Indies. Later, in the nineteenth century, more Europeans ventured south from Batavia to escape the crowded, unsanitary conditions of the old city around Sunda Kelapa.89 Batavia had long borne the uncertain distinction among Europeans of being the unhealthiest city in Southeast Asia,90 and Pieter van der Brug has recently made a cogent case for the role of malarial deaths in the decline of the VOC from the mid- eighteenth century.91 The European reorientation toward the southern suburbs, where the well-to-do Dutch formed a privileged enclave, was virtually complete by the early nineteenth century. The beginnings of a European exodus from Batavia was marked by the establishment of the Governor-General’s Palace at Buitenzorg (now Bogor) in 1745.92 The botanical gardens (established in 1817), in which the new seat of government was situated, became symbolic of Dutch claims of authority over Java’s interior and, as I shall argue in

86 Marie-Odette Scalliet, ‘The East India Company: 1600–1800’ in Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics (Amsterdam, 1999): 20. For the seventeenth century more generally, see Dirk de Vries, ‘Dutch Marine Cartography’in George S Keyes, Mirror of Empire: Dutch Marine Art of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1990): 71. 87 Anthony Reid, An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (Singapore, 2005): 48. 88 Taylor (1983): 94; Abeyasekere: 25. 89 See Taylor (1983): 53; Abeyasekere: 41, 44, 54. 90 Savage: 161–5. 91 Pieter van der Brug, ‘Unhealthy Batavia and the decline of the VOC in the eighteenth century’ in Kees Grijns and Peter JM Nas (eds), Jakarta-Batavia: Sociocultural Essays (Leiden, 2000). 92 Abeyasekere: 43. A country estate for Governors-General was established in Buitenzorg in 1745, but the journey there from Batavia remained hazardous during the eighteenth century.

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Chapter 3, of the establishment of order over the island’s landscapes.

For the history of Dutch knowledge of deeper Javanese interiors, 1830 serves as an important date. It marked Dutch victory in a war that had raged in Central Java from 1825, and represented the advent of colonial control over the symbolic heart of the island.93 The year 1830 also heralded the implementation of the so-called cultuurstelsel, or cultivation system, the brainchild of Governor-General (r 1830–3). In theory (if not in uniform practice) the system on Java and Madura required each village to set aside one-fifth of its land and labour for the production of export crops to be sold at fixed prices to the colonial government, which retained the profits from auctions in Europe.94 The scheme was intended as a solution to the economic crises that plagued the Netherlands and the Indies after decades of war in Europe and declining profits under the defunct VOC.95 In a financial sense it was highly successful. By 1831, the colonial budget was balanced and the colonial government was able to begin funding the conquest of the so- called ‘Outer Islands’ beyond Java. Between 1860 and 1866, a staggering 34% of state revenue in the Netherlands was derived from the proceeds of the system, and the Dutch government was able to to reduce taxes, build crucial infrastructure, and reinvigorate Amsterdam’s status as an international trading city.96

However, ‘cultuurstelsel’ also became a by-word for corruption and exploitation at the hands of Dutch and indigenous officials who were keen to expand their share of the profits it generated.97 One critique, composed by a disgruntled and impetuous Dutch official in the 1850s, was to become arguably the most famous Dutch colonial novel of all time — Max Havelaar, Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company by Eduard Douwes Dekker (aka Multatuli). Though modern historians generally diverge from Dekker’s simplistic conclusion that Dutch tolerance of rapacious bupatis (district heads) was

93 Ricklefs: 155. 94 Ricklefs: 156. Ricklefs mentions here that villages could keep the excess payment if the sale of export crops exceeded their land tax obligation. 95 Ricklefs: 155. 96 Ricklefs: 159–60. 97 Ricklefs: 157.

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principally to blame for the system’s injustices, most have condemned the policy for the economic underdevelopment that was its consequence.98 The system was gradually dismantled from the 1860s onward, starting with those crops that were least profitable — indigo, tea and cinnamon (1865), and tobacco (1866). Significantly, those crops that remained lucrative (sugar and coffee) were phased out more slowly, beginning in the 1870s.99

Much has been written about the short and long term economic, social and political impact of the cultivation system on the people whose labour it utilised. Labour, indeed, was the key to the system, more so than land. At its height, the scheme involved 70% of all agricultural families on Java between 1837 and 1851, more than half of them coffee producers. In , over 90% of the population was involved in the system during this period. By contrast, in 1850 the cultivation system relied upon only 4% of Java’s cultivated land.100 However, its impact on Java’s landscapes, though perhaps impossible to measure quantitatively, was not so limited as land use patterns might suggest. Some landscapes were converted from rice-growing areas to cash-crop regions, a radical transformation that unfolded before the eyes of large communities. Indeed, coffee and sugar were grown in the most densely populated regions of Java.101 Sugar and indigo were especially intrusive cultivars, siphening land, labour and water away from rice and other subsistence crops.102 The major famines that plagued Cirebon on Java’s north coast in 1844 and 1849–50 were one of the more brutal manifestations of the demands that the cultivation system imposed

98 Ricklefs concluded: ‘The Dutch succeeded in milking the economy of Java, while returning significant benefits to only a small stratum of the indigenous society’: 160. RE Elson, in Village Java Under the Cultivation System, 1830–1870 (Sydney, 1994), recognised the benefits of the system, but also the imbalanced development that resulted: 305–7, 322. 99 Ricklefs: 161. Sugar was phased out over 12 years, beginning in 1878. Coffee was phased out in Priangan in 1917, and on Java’s north coast in 1919. 100 Ricklefs: 157. 101 Elson: 229. On Java, coffee and sugar grew on different kinds of land — coffee on hillsides, sugar often on the same land as rice. 102 Elson: 45, 47, 49–50; Ricklefs: 159–60.

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on rice-dependent populations.103 The cultivation system also resulted in the addition of warehouses, irrigation complexes, factories and port facilities to Java’s landscapes.104 Many of these facilities were constructed using corvée labour (that is, without expense to the colonial government).105 Coffee, which had been grown by Indonesians in garden hedgerows and among mixed forest crops, was now raised in cleared uplands and on mountain slopes — expanding oases of systematic agriculture among villages and forested wilderness.106 Robert Hefner has described this process in the Tengger highlands of East Java where, from 1830 to 1850, all land between 600 and 1200 metres above sea level was cleared and planted with coffee.107 Later in the nineteenth century this deforestation resulted in serious soil erosion and, according to Hefner, ‘[a]n entire forest ecosystem had disappeared.’108

Transport networks were forged through these receding forest lands. Roads and railways were a significant means by which the Dutch thought themselves capable of filling the blank spaces on their maps. These umbilical structures connected coastlines, burgeoning cities and agricultural hinterlands. In themselves, they became the object of keen Dutch interest because they symbolised progress and represented vestiges of modern, European- style landscapes in the tropics. Photographs in Rob Nieuwenhuys’ Baren en Oudgasten reveal just how arduous travel in Java remained at the turn of the twentieth century.109 The arrival of steam trains in particular was often the source of great delight and nostalgia among Dutch colonists, as attested to by the large numbers of photographs of trains and railroads that survived the colonial era, and frequent mentions in literature (see Chapter 3).

103 Ricklefs: 159. 104 Elson: 84–5; Ricklefs: 159. 105 Elson: 90–1. 106 Elson: 65. 107 Robert W Hefner, The Political Economy of Mountain Java (Berkeley,1990): 10. 108 Hefner: 41. 109 Nieuwenhuys (1998): River crossings often involved ferries rather than bridges: 117; Cars became stranded on dirt roads after a flood: 124.

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On Java, the construction of the Grote Postweg () under the guidance of Governor-General Herman Willem Daendals in the early nineteenth century drew accolades from artists and writers for decades after its completion. Even the novelist Multatuli, normally so acerbic toward colonial policy, was a great admirer of Daendels’ efforts in this regard.110 In paintings, the Postweg (which eventually spanned the length of Java) became associated with the deeds of Dutch kings and Indies officials. Mobility signified power for the agents of Dutch rule, as it had to Javanese nobility.111 A late nineteenth century Haaxman painting of The Carriage of Mangkunegoro IV (c 1870) shows Dutch and Javanese elites (in this case, a Sultan and a Governor-General) sharing the road, borne together in a symbol of fashionable prestige, a gilded carriage manufactured in a prominent Hague workshop.112 For less elevated travellers too, the Postweg became a means of visualising new topographies, as attested to by the early nineteenth century paintings of Antoine Payen113 and the mid-nineteenth century work of Abraham Salm (1801–76).114 Turn-of-the-century photographs also showed stretches of road as reminders of treasured places for colonists on Java, like the section of Postweg that passed Banju Biru, a popular bathing and picnic destination near Pasuruan.115

Roads would also be important in Sumatra, though here their initial construction proceeded less from a Dutch notion of the need to unify the island than from the requirements of regionally-based government and commercial agriculture.116 (However, it is worth noting that the completion of the first trans-Sumatran highway in 1938 coincided with the island’s unification for the first time under a centralised government, with its Dutch headquarters

110 Multatuli, Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (London, 1987): 63. 111 Taylor (2003): 22. 112 Zandvliet (2002a): 308–10. 113 See Scalliet (1995): plate 31. 114 See Richard Hamblyn and Yu-Chee Chong, Java. Naar Schilderijen en Tekeningen van A Salm (Singapore, 1991). More detail on roads in Dutch colonial art is provided in Chapter 3. 115 See photo by Kurkdjian (1899) in Nieuwenhuys (1982): 65. 116 Karl Peltzer, Planter and Peasant: Colonial Policy and the Agrarian Struggle in East Sumatra, 1863-1947 (The Hague, 1978): 43; Gusti Asnan, ‘Transportation on the west coast of Sumatra in the nineteenth century’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 158(4), 2002: 733–4; Reid (2005): 29.

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based in ).117 When European plantations were spreading throughout the east coast during the 1870s, overland travel was still arduous and unpleasant. Jan Breman’s Taming the Coolie Beast (1990) is rich with anecdotes about the trials of Dutch men and women struggling to make their way along the east coast’s boggy paths. In one vignette, the wife of a plantation manager required the services of fifty unfortunate coolies to spirit her away by litter (in painful stages) from the muddy interior to the coast. Another anecdote tells of heavy rains in 1884, when Governor-General himself was forced to wade knee-deep along the swampy road between Medan and Labuan harbour. Two years later a railroad was built along the route.118 The west coast too had offered travelling Dutch officials unpleasant resistance: it was Governor-General Van den Bosch’s beleaguered visit to the region in 1833 during the Padri Wars that precipitated the construction of a road between Padang and the interior.119 A century later, Van den Bosch may not have been able to recognise this region. Outside Java, it was the west coast of Sumatra that boasted the longest roads and most numerous bridges in the Indies,120 many of them built by coolies and corvée labourers, as had been the case with the Postweg on Java.121 In the 1920s, when road construction was booming, Sumatra also had more automobiles per capita than anywhere else in the Indies122 — more than 7000 in West Sumatra alone.123

Once inland, Dutch colonists found much to admire in the fertile lands and rural villages that they encountered, particularly on Java and later Bali, both of which furnished the most popular and well-known images of the mooi Indië, or ‘beautiful Indies’, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Farmed, settled countryside was the most attractive component of Indies landscapes to Dutch colonists, much as it had been to indigenous rulers who extracted tribute from such regions. Images of productive lands and contented,

117 Reid (2005): 17, 33. 118 Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial State in Southeast Asia (Delhi, 1990): 46–7. 119 Asnan: 732. The road was completed 1833–41. 120 Asnan: 735. 121 Asnan: 734. 122 Reid (2005): 29. 123 Asnan: 727.

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settled peoples became paragons of beauty in colonial views of the Indies. Indeed, as shall be demonstrated in Chapter 4, images of peace and prosperity were consistently preferred (particulary among painters) even where poverty, violence and unrest in reality reigned over the landscape. In scenes of rice fields and rural villages, and in vaguely pastoral panoramas, colonial artists took the discomforting wildness out of Indies nature while preserving its exoticism, freqently without alluding to the more prosaic interests — plantations and processing factories — that kept colonists occupied in such landscapes.

From the second half of the nineteenth century colonial novelists began adding their impressions of interior landscapes to the expanding body of painters’ and photographers’ views. Often writers fashioned images that had been overlooked by visual artists, particularly of those landscapes that were considered unsightly, like wildernesses, wastelands and areas subject to shifting cultivation. The particular views of novelists are considered in more detail elsewhere, especially in Chapter 7. For the present, it perhaps suffices to suggest that by the late nineteenth century some Dutch writers were conscious of how different their ideas about Indies landscapes were relative to the clichéd paintings that were so often purveyed as signifiers of Indies landscapes. Writing under the name E Breton de Nijs in his autobiographical Faded Portraits (1954), Rob Nieuwenhuys recalled his first girlfriend in the Netherlands and her mother’s fondness for a garish painting in the family home by Nol Dezentje (a relative of Ernest Dezentje perhaps?): ‘a memento of “our Indies”, of course, with the inevitable purple volcano and yellow sawas [sic] and among them several smears or spots of colour that were meant to represent people’.124 Nieuwenhuys, who was among the first Indo-Europeans in the Netherlands to revive broad interest in photographic records of colonial life in the Indies, recollected his boredom at such painterly images, which were ‘always the same’.125

Mountains

Nieuwenhuys’ mention of purple peaks in Faded Portraits is fitting because one of the

124 E Breton de Nijs, Faded Portraits (Amherst, 1982) [First published 1954]: 114. 125 Breton de Nijs: 115.

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essential ingredients in colonial mooi Indië paintings was the ubiquitous mountain. Gently- wafting smoke emitting from its crest was a frequent embellishment: too frequent, perhaps, since most Indies volcanoes were dormant or extinct by the nineteenth century.126 To enliven the majesty of Indies mountains with a streak of menace must have been irresistable in an age when the unpredictable power of nature was, for the first time in European history, fashionable.

In western Europe, it was not until the eighteenth century that artists, poets and writers began to revere mountain landscapes.127 Before then, mountains had often been regarded with suspicion as wild places beyond the reach of human culture128 — uncultivated and inimical to settlement, or home to ‘uncivilised’ peoples.129 The veneration of mountains and dramatic landscapes that accompanied the advent of Romanticism in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was therefore unprecedented in the region’s history. As a movement, Romanticism never caught on in the Netherlands the way it did in other European countries.130 Some art historians have argued that, unlike in France for instance, where official art and the academy formed a stronger institutional target for anti- establishment movements, Dutch painters had been free since the seventeenth century to glorify local landscapes and scenes from everyday life.131 Romanticism was not, of course, a movement that celebrated the provincial and the ordinary: it honoured the sublime in

126 Hamblyn and Chong: 69. 127 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York, 1959): 1, 3. 128 Nicolson: 3. 129 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London, 1983): 258–60. 130 RH Fuchs, Dutch Painting (London, 1996): 148. Fuchs’ recent analysis of Romantic art in the Netherlands contradicts the earlier work of Robert Rosenblum, who argued that there was a Northern Romantic tradition and furthermore, that it was carried on into the late nineteenth century by artists like Vincent van Gogh — Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (New York, 1975): 70–9. 131 Anita Brookner, Romanticism and its Discontents (London, 2000): 2; Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth Century Art (London and Boston, 1984): 38, 219-23; CCP Marius, Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1973): 43.

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nature, and the profound emotions that its scale and violence evoked in human observers.132 Peculiarly, in the Indies, where the vastness and diversity of landscapes might have elicited a dramatic response from artists, very few paintings can properly be described as Romantic, with perhaps the notable exception of Raden Saleh’s work.

Raden Saleh’s subdued portraits for his European clients notwithstanding, his dramatic views of Indies landscapes — particularly the eruption of Mt Merapi, which he observed in person in 1865 — have few counterparts among other Indies artists of his era. Mountains, however, seemed to invite an overtly sentimental response from a surprising variety of Dutch artists and writers. The usually caustic Multatuli actually included a (very mediocre) ode to Mt Salak at Buitenzorg in Max Havelaar.133 The landscape paintings of Abraham Salm, which normally tended toward the picturesque, unmistakably lauded the magnificence of Java’s mountains, which tower over deep ravines and flimsy bridges in his work. Salm strove to emphasise the monumentality of Java’s mountains, sometimes using painterly tricks like showing tall, straight palms in the foreground to reinforce the stature of peaks in the background.134 Java’s mountains were equally impressive to Dutch visitors in the early twentieth century. In Priangan during the 1920s, Jan Poortenaar observed that: ‘In that tremendous landscape man stands as a pygmy.’135 Poortenaar was particularly sensible to the historical nature of such landscapes. ‘Trees, villages, towns, railroads, factories, fetish-shrines, crouch at their feet; black man and white man; all things are transitory. Above all rise their torn bare cones. Centuries pass without leaving a trace. Nations, races, religions, come and go; there is no change. Only the volcanoes’ eternal vigil.’136

132 Umberto Eco, On Beauty (London, 2004): 281, 299; Lawrence Gowing, A History of Art (Oxfordshire, 1995): 746–9; William Cronan, ‘The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature’ in William Cronan (ed), Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York and London, 1995); Rosen and Zerner: 37, 60–1. 133 Multatuli (1987): 120. 134 Salm’s image of one of the highest of Java’s mountains, De Vulkaan de Smeroe, Genomen uit de Residentie Pasoeroean (The Volcano Smeru, Taken in the Residency of Pasuruan), is a case in point. See Hamblyn and Chong: 23. 135 Poortenaar: 38. 136 Poortenaar: 43.

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Sumatra, with its vaster wildernesses, invited similar reflections on the ancient history resident in its mountainous interior. An album of chromolithographs entitled De Indische Archipel: Tafareelen uit de Natuur en het Volksleven in Indië (The Indies Archipelago: Scenes from Nature and Everyday life in the Indies) was published in The Hague between 1865 and 1876, around the same time that the east coast of Sumatra was opened to commercial plantations. The album featured an image after FC Wilsen entitled De Berg Ophir Op Sumatra’s Westkust (Mt Ophir on Sumatra’s West Coast),137 which showed an almost primeval landscape, silent and undisturbed, with a still lake and densely wooded mountains (smoke emitting from them, of course) shrouded in a golden twilight [Plate 6]. A touch of Orientalist glamour is added by the presence of two elephants138 in the bottom right-hand corner. The overall impression is of a vast, ‘untouched’ landscape dominated by mountains, jungle and exotic animals — a curious image of timelessness at just the moment when Sumatra’s wildernesses were beginning to be transformed by colonialism.139

Once traversable and familiar to the Dutch, some mountain ranges in the Indies became domesticated, converted into hill stations that functioned as health spas and resorts. These locales were designed for well-to-do Europeans to escape the heat of the plains and the drudgery of urban or plantation life. Mountain retreats offered homesick (or just sick) colonists a range of experiences that were meant to replicate Europe — a cool climate, grand hotels, and the almost exclusive company (servants excepted) of other Europeans. The illusion of Europe (but not necessarily the Netherlands) was aided by the landscape itself — conifers and flowers that thrived in the cooler climate and provided an alpine atmosphere, and slopes planted with fruits and vegetables, like cabbages, lettuce and strawberries, that made nostalgic Europeans’ mouths water. Jan Poortenaar was delighted with such sights when he encountered them in Priangan in the 1920s: ‘Marigolds, roses and convolvuluses bloom in the garden on the cool mountain slope, together with violets and forget-me-nots. Lower down in the nursery beds, artichokes, strawberries and many other

137 See Bastin and Brommer: plate 84. 138 This was a plausible addition, according to Peter Boomgaard, who notes that elephants were still present in Sumatra and were even tamed for hunting purposes on occasion — (2001): 110.

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fruits and vegetables thrive.’140 In Tosari, a popular retreat in the Tengger highlands of East Java, European vegetables had been cultivated since the mid-eighteenth century to provision the Dutch garrison at Pasuruan.141 Tosari became an important rest-stop for Europeans in the late nineteenth century, when it boasted three hotels with a capacity to accommodate over two hundred guests, and offered diversions like tennis, golf, croquet, and tourist walks.142 Nieuwenhuys included photographs of day-trippers enjoying such activities in his Baren en Oudgasten.143

By the early twentieth century mountain retreats had also been established in Sumatra on the shores of Lake Toba, at Prapat, Berastagi, Kabarijahe, and on the Karo Plateau144 — Batak lands that only a couple of generations ago had been unfamiliar to most Europeans. At Berastagi, plantation firms provided bungalows for employees’ vacations,145 which the Dutch deemed to be especially beneficial to European women and children in that it exposed them to a more homogenously white society.146 As in Java, some of Sumatra’s more spectacular interior landscapes became the destination for tourists. In the 1920s, Jan Poortenaar was able to describe the Karbouwengat as a ‘famous’ canyon;147 indeed, it had already been photographed by the studio of Woodbury and Page.148 Poortenaar also visited the mountain village of Berastagi, which he described thus: ‘If Medan is the London, the of the district, this is the Brighton, the Plage.’149 A decade later the novelist Madelon Lulofs, who wrote from her own experience as a planter’s wife, described the mountain retreat as a pleasant oasis: the cool air injected tired plantation workers and their families

140 Poortenaar: 102. 141 Hefner: 38. 142 Hefner: 50. 143 Nieuwenhuys (1998): 134–5. 144 Peltzer: 26. 145 Peltzer: 30–1. 146 Stoler (1990): 55. Stoler has suggested that mountain retreats functioned as a form of ‘environmental segregation’. 147 Poortenaar: 154. 148 Wachlin: 174–5. 149 Poortenaar: 164.

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with new energy, food was fresher and more varied; the local even seemed more vigorous than did the plains folk, in her view.150

At this time mountains (and their more volatile counterparts, volcanoes) still retained an element of danger to colonists, as the eruptions of Krakatau in May and August of 1883 famously demonstrated. In Marguerite Schenkhuisen’s memoirs of growing up in early twentieth century Java, she recounts her family’s fortune in narrowly escaping the effects of a volcanic disaster that damaged much of the village but left her own home intact.151 Such eruptions could be devastating. A year after an explosion of the same volcano (Mt Kelud, in 1901), an entire frame of a photograph is occupied by the massive gouge in the mountain’s side and the splintered rocks that it left behind [Plate 7]. Colonists were fascinated by such landscapes, which attracted scientific scrutiny and intrepid amateur observers alike. They afforded thrilling images such as an 1845 lithograph of a brave adventurer poised on Mt Merapi’s northern rim, walking stick and telescope in hand.152 Some volcanoes had even become tourist attractions, like the crater of Mt Bromo in Probolinggo, which was painted by Antoine Payen in the early nineteenth ce ntury153 and Abraham Salm in 1856154 long before it became the subject of photographs.155 Similarly, Bali’s Mt Batur assumed its contemporary status as both sacred site and tourist destination in the early twentieth century. In the 1920s, Poortenaar — like many visitors to Bali today — made a special journey to witness a sunrise over the mountain.156

150 Madelon Szekely-Lulofs, Rubber (Oxford,1991) [First published 1931]: 218, 219, 216 respectively. Note that, for convenience (and to avoid confusion with her husband, Laszlo Szekely), I refer to the author as ‘Madelon Lulofs’ throughout. 151 Marguerite Schenkhuisen, Memoirs of an Indo Woman: Twentieth Century Life in the East Indies and Abroad (Athens, 1993): 82. Schenkhuisen refers to the eruption of Mt Kelut in 1919. 152 In Bastin and Brommer: plate 151 — Nordseite des Merapi (North Side of Merapi) by E Baensch after Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, Topografischer und Naturwissenschaftlicher Atlas zur Reise Durch Java (Magdeburg, 1845). 153 In Scalliet (1995): plate 51. 154 Hamblyn and Chong: 34. 155 Boomgaard and Van Dijk include a photograph of Mt Bromo (taken in 1918) in Het Indië Boek: 28. 156 ‘It was a sunrise such as we had seldom seen, even though here in the East they are so often almost terrible in their loveliness. An artist stands aghast as Nature handles her vast palette with her own unbounded

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Forests

The Dutch did not often seem disposed toward locating their general preference for peaceful, prosperous vistas in the forested landscapes of the Indies. In Dutch notions of Indies landscapes, forests came in one of two guises: as ‘jungle’ or oerwoud/oerbos (primeval or virgin forest), which was part of wilderness and wasteland; or as commercial forest, and therefore as part of the cultivated landscapes of the Indies. Occasionally the very wildness of the jungle inspired Dutch artists to ruminate on the exotic life that might be contained within it. Abraham Salm’s Woest Landschap (Waste/Wild Landscape), a painting of a leopard drinking from a pool deep in an East Javanese forest, provides a case in point [Plate 8]. Richard Hamblyn and Yu-Chee Chong, Salm’s recent biographers, have suggested that the whole scene was concocted in Salm’s imagination, or perhaps staged with a stuffed animal in a studio rather than observed in the wild.157 For one thing, as Peter Boomgaard has pointed out recently, European and Indonesian elites rarely pursued big cats in forests, where hunting and tracking were more difficult than out in the open.158 Tigers and leopards were more often encountered in environments that were shared by humans and large animals, like the edges of forests and areas where land had been recently

liberty ...’ — Poortenaar: 133. 157 The authors point out, for example, that the landscape appears physically impossible where the fork appears in the stream, and deem it unlikely that such a sharp diversion to the right would not have swept away the entire embankment — Hamblyn and Chong: 59. 158 See Peter Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear (2001). Boomgaard found that, before 1800, the Sultans of Banten hunted, and the Sultans of Mataram had tigers and other wild animals kept in enclosed game reserves. Central Javanese rulers also presided over rituals where tigers were captured and brought to a large field, where spectators gathered to watch the animals being killed: 108–9. On Sumatra in the same period, it appears that rulers did not hunt, at least not in dense forests: 110. After 1800, Javanese and Sumatran royals did not participate in tiger hunts: 111. Excepting the period between 1900 and 1914, hunting was not particularly popular among the Dutch in the Indies, certainly not when compared to the British in India. Those Europeans who hunted usually did so out of necessity, to eradicate a nuisance tiger that was threatening plantations or villages: 135–6.

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cleared to make way for agriculture.159 It may be that Salm once encountered a big cat at the borders of his estate. But his painting of a leopard in the jungle was almost certainly the product of his imaginings on what occurred in the wilderness that he and other planters rarely ventured into.

Commercial forests, particularly of teak and sandalwood, have been the subject of much recent historical research, for it was around such landscapes that early conservation efforts were organised. Dutch artists and writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not express serious concerns about conservation in their paintings, photographs or novels. Their attitudes to Indies landscapes, and particularly to forests, reflected a different set of values that centred around political and aesthetic ideals, and to a lesser extent, around utility. Some writers, like Madelon Lulofs and her (second) husband Laszlo Szekely, occasionally expressed concern over the large-scale felling of old-growth forest on the east coast of Sumatra. At the same time, both writers frequently articulated revulsion at the density and monotony of the Sumatran jungle, and celebrated the landscapes that succeeded it: plantations, houses and gardens, and roads and railways — signs of civilisation and progress (more on this in Chapter 3).

Many European visitors to the Indies were disappointed by its tropical forests. Their tedious greenery disappointed nineteenth century travellers who had been schooled on botanical exhibitions and illustrated texts (the orchid was particularly popular), and who unrealistically expected to encounter an endless variety of exotic flora in the field.160 For the Dutch, accustomed to unobstructed views across flat, grassy countryside, tropical forests also proffered an alarming opaqueness. In the 1920s in Priangan — a region that had been significantly deforested to make way for coffee plantations161 — Jan Poortenaar still encountered enough jungle to make him feel uncomfortable: ‘As the forest thickens the

159 Boomgaard (2001): 24, 38. Boomgaard refers to tigers as ‘culture followers’, because they inhabit areas that have been recently disturbed by humans. 160 Savage: 233–4. 161 See Robert Cribb, Historical Atlas of Indonesia (2000, Surrey): 95, on the ‘Priangan system’ of coffee deliveries, which ended in the 1870s.

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light becomes more vague. A dead silence. The atmosphere grows more and more damp and close, the ground more sticky and slippery with half-rotten plants or stones covered with wet moss.’162 And: ‘Nothing would distinguish the woods from those of Europe save for their oppressive monotony of growth, of colour, of everything. It is the antithesis of what the European conceives the East to be.’163

Such a feeling of unease seems to have been compounded for Europeans when they encountered vast tracts of jungle that were embedded within landscapes of even greater magnitude and variety, such as in Sumatra. This is certainly suggested by the almost dissociative experience that one of Madelon Lulofs’ characters has in the presence of Sumatra’s forested mountains (discussed in Chapter 7). Poortenaar’s preference for Bali above other islands in the Indies provides a further insight into colonial aversions to forested Indies landscapes: ‘Two things constitute Bali’s glory’, Poortenaar stated. ‘The first is that the land is of a nature and structure which can be apprehended and therefore enjoyed. It has mountains and great views, certainly, but not so many of the one nor so vast as to the other as one finds in Java or Sumatra, so that the landscape is more intimate, more endearingly proportioned to man.’164 Poortenaar’s appreciation for clear views and navigable landscapes is one that was echoed by other Dutch artists in the Indies, both before and after him.

F Intangibles — Climate and seasons G

Dutch impressions of Indies nature, though often focussed upon topographical features like landscape, were also strongly influenced by those intangible aspects of place like climate, the rhythm of seasons, and light. My own recent experiences of the contrast between the Netherlands and Indonesia at a similar time of year perhaps serve to illustrate. In the middle of spring (April) in the Netherlands, it is still very cool and often drizzly. The light is clear

162 Poortenaar: 48. 163 Poortenaar: 51. 164 Poortenaar: 133.

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and sharp and the sky is a wan blue, often streaked with white and dark clouds, very much the way seventeenth century painters depicted it. Bright flowers flood the market stalls, and strawberries are popular. At the onset of the dry season in Java (May) it is still hot and humid. When the sky is clear (a rare phenomenon now in busy cities like Jakarta), the sun’s light is bright and blistering, and objects shimmer in the distance. For a new arrival to the Indies from Holland in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, the hot air, strong light and unfamiliar smells must often have been overwhelming. Colonial novels are particularly enlightening on this point, since climate and seasons are by nature difficult to depict in paintings or photographs except by indirect reference.

European responses to and recollections of the tropical climate often highlighted the difference between old hands and new arrivals. Maria Dermoût, who spent the first half of her life in the Indies, fondly remembered how she and her friends played through the midday siesta, oblivious to the heat, during her childhood on Java.165 On the other hand Laszlo Szekely, a Hungarian planter who grew up in Europe, spent the first pages of his autobiographical novel on life in Sumatra complaining about the ‘deadening, stupefying heat’.166 For example: ‘There was the terrible, oppressive heat, although it was still early morning. A quarter to six. And we were perspiring already.’167

New arrivals also found it difficult to comprehend seasonal changes in the Indies, misinterpreting the more or less constant high temperatures for a lack of seasons altogether. Jan Poortenaar’s observations from the early 1920s provide a case in point: ‘There is nothing in the East Indies whereby one can tell that a certain day is the first of January; through the changeless seasons each day is like to each.’168 By contrast, old hands like Maria Dermoût acquired an early understanding of seasonal changes and remembered, in her novel Yesterday, how these were linked to the social lives and cultural expressions of

165 Maria Dermoût, Yesterday (New York, 1959): 21. 166 Laszlo Szekely, Tropic Fever (Kuala Lumpur, 1979): 1. According to Anthony Reid, who wrote the introduction to the 1979 English translation of Tropic Fever, the novel was first published in Dutch in 1935, but was published in Hungary (where it was not successful) during the 1920s: viii. 167 Szekely: 28. 168 Poortenaar: 98.

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local people: ‘The sugar cane grew in the fields and ripened,’ Demoût recalled,

… turned yellow, full of juice, and in the dry season it was cut and ground. But first came the harvest festival. Decorated bamboo gates were set up at the entrance to the mill. Water buffalo were killed and their heads with bent horns and wide-open glassy eyes were hung near the big machines, garlands of leaves around their necks. And the buffalo blood was sprinkled on the cruel iron cylinders which crushed the sugar cane, so they would have their blood, and there needn’t be any accidents …

Before the festival was all over, and before the rains, there came the nicest time of the year.169

Many Dutch colonists were sensible to the nature of seasons in the Indies, punctuated as they were by levels of rainfall rather than significant changes in temperature, but lamented the climate in preference for their memories of Europe. The unrelenting rain in the wet season was a frequent complaint among the Dutch living in the Indies. In Louis Couperus’ The Hidden Force (1900), the Dutch wife of a civil servant finds the monsoon season on Java almost unbearable, and bemoans the damage the damp wreaks upon her décor and dresses (more on this in Chapter 7). 170 The violence of rainstorms and banjir (flash floods) in the Indies even shocked veterans like the writer Madelon Lulofs, who grew up in the Indies. In her novel Rubber, Lulofs wrote of the suddenness with which heavy rains began, obliterated everything in their path, and then receded.171 The variation between wet and dry periods often did not satisfy Europeans in the Indies that the tropics demonstrated ‘real’ seasons — by which most colonists meant the difference between a northern hemisphere winter and summer. The writer-planter Laszlo Szekely perhaps best exemplified this sentiment in his novel Tropic Fever, wherein he remembered Europe as the ‘cool country’ of ‘spring, summer, autumn and winter.’172

Madelon Lulofs suggested in Rubber that she was familiar with (perhaps even sympathetic

169 Dermoût, Yesterday (1959): 26–7. 170 Louis Couperus, The Hidden Force (London, 1992) [First published 1900]: 159. 171 See Lulofs (1991): 112 — ‘The rain lasted an hour. The road was flooded, and the plain was one immense lake. Suddenly, without dusk, the evening fell over the waste of waters. The rain ceased as suddenly as it had begun.’ Laszlo Szekely had similar recollections of the suddenness of rainstorms in Tropic Fever: 205, 207. 172 Szekely: 85.

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to) the frustration that European newcomers experienced in the tropical climate, and their nostalgia for the familiar seasons of home. Lulofs’ most stridently European character in Rubber, Renée, muses not long after her arrival in Sumatra: ‘Now, in Holland, it was spring. The buds were full, there were violets and anemones. Soon the lilac and the hawthorn would follow. The whole world was scented with honey and young grass. There was new life, everything was new. A multitude of feelings surged through her — homesickness, despair, longing, youth, spring. Spring! Here was only greenness, darkness, solitude, silence.’173

At best, such complaints constituted a nuisance, a frustration, a source of homesickness for Europeans living in the Indies. At worst, the climate was credited with the unhinging of European morals and mental health.174 Several historians have noted the prevalence among nineteenth century Europeans of the idea of ‘tropical madness’, which was first described in Germany’s African colonies but became a common observation wherever Europeans settled in tropical zones.175 Laszlo Szekely’s novel attributed all sorts of uncivilised behaviours to the climate of Sumatra, including delusions, moral dissolution and even murder.176 Szekely’s novel was aptly named Tropic Fever,177 for in Europe it was commonly held that

173 Lulofs (1933): 161. 174 See Gouda (1995): 147. 175 Breman (1990): 198. 176 See Laszlo Szekely, Tropic Fever (Singapore, 1984). One of the planters in Szekely’s novel has a beautiful, bored European wife, who takes to flirting with Badur Singh, her Bengali chauffeur, to while away her time on the Sumatran frontier. In a brief moment of self-censure, she reflects upon the inappropriateness of her behaviour, and wonders what effect it may be having on the chauffeur: ‘The tropics were a dangerous country. A man’s senses quickly reached fever heat …’: 228. Indeed, in Chapter 16, Badur Singh apparently gives in to his passions and murders the woman whom he knows he cannot have: 267. The narrator himself wavers on the border of tropical madness near the end of the novel, when he is sent on one last clearing expedition into the Sumatran jungle in order to make way for a new plantation. He feels entirely isolated (despite the company of a dozen coolies), and reflects at one point: ‘Here I was alone. Here everything became blunted. The beginning of tropic frenzy? Melancholia, malaria …’: 339. 177 This was the English title, which was first published in 1937. Anthony Reid notes that the Hungarian title appeared in the 1920s as Oeserdoektoel az Ultetvenyeking (From Primeval Forest to Plantation). The Dutch

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over-exposure to such conditions could bring on illnesses like ‘tropical neurasthenia’.178

As we shall see in more detail in Part III, for many colonial novelists the Indies climate became a foil for dissolute European behaviour, most commonly sloth, transgresssion of racial identity, and sexual promiscuity (or a combination of all three). While the effect of the tropical climate on Europeans most often absorbed colonists, they were also convinced that it could explain the collective failings of their indigenous subjects (as identified by Europeans) — particularly, indolence and overt sensuality, the same weaknesses that Europeans felt themselves in danger of acquiring in the torrid climate. Chapter 7 demonstrates how the intangible aspects of Indies nature were made responsible for the shedding of European moral codes in the tropics, as though these were a skin discarded as easily as an overcoat made redundant by the heat and humidity. Environmental determinism, then, obscured the political and ideological realities of colonial hypocrisy, despotism and, often, brutality.

G F

Dutch views of the Indies often ended, as they began, on the coast. The poignant image of a man silhouetted against a glistening ocean and a departing steamship that appears in Nieuwenhuys’ Baren en Oudgasten179 recurred often in Dutch narratives of Indies landscapes. In the history of Dutch-made images of themselves, such pictures were by no means anomalous: seventeenth century paintings of life in Dutch coastal towns also showed the people (usually women) who were left behind when men ventured abroad to find their

translation, which appeared in 1935, used the title Van Oerwoud tot Plantage. Verhaal van een Plantersleven (From Jungle to Plantation: A Tale of a Planter’s Life). See Reid (1979): viii, x. 178 Mentioned in Stoler (1990): 54. For examples of such beliefs in Dutch colonial literature see, for example, E du Perron, Country of Origin (Periplus, 1999) [First published 1935]: 114, where the author (writing semi- autobiographically) credits his father’s moodiness to ‘neurasthenia’. 179 Nieuwenhuys (1998): 190. Boomgaard and Van Dijk also include a photograph of two European women watching a steamship depart from Ternate, Maluku. One seems to be comforting the other, for she has her arm about her companion’s shoulders: 457.

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fortunes.180 In the history of Dutch images of themselves in Indies landscapes, however, Nieuwenhuys’ photograph is important because, ostensibly, it represents a reversal of the Eurocentric perspective of Indies landscapes and histories from aboard the deck of a ship.

By the late nineteenth century some Indies landscapes had become familiar and dear to Dutch colonists. Coasts, colonial cities, cultivated landscapes, mountain resorts — these were among the landscapes that had become new homes to the Dutch, as well as sources of imperial pride and images of aesthetic beauty. At the same time, there remained wildernesses and wastelands, landscapes that were hostile to colonial rule and that challenged Dutch confidence as foreigners in the tropics.181 Eric Tagliacozzo has stated that Dutch fears ‘of the “wild space” of the frontier regions never really waned’ in the late nineteenth and even early twentieth centures (because of smuggling, among other things), and that some formal borders remained psychological frontiers long after the physical boundaries of the Indies had been decided. In this context, the image of a European gazing out to the sea from an Indies shore does not indicate such a radical change in colonial perspective after all. An alternative set of landscapes — those of the Netherlands, or those of a colonial ideal — remained the imaginary template against which the unassimilated landscapes of the Indies were compared until the very end of the colonial period. Different types of landscapes, therefore, often with their own histories, existed in colonial minds simultaneously. As we shall see in the next chapter, Dutch colonial artists and writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries developed a vocabulary with which to traverse these diverse topographies and make them reflect, in their own minds at least, the imposition of colonial order on Indonesian landscapes.

180 The theme of women receiving letters, which are read indoors with a marine painting displayed prominently in the background — a referance to absent loved ones — is common in seventeenth century Dutch painting. See, for example, Gabriel Metsu’s Woman Reading a Letter (which includes a dog, the classic symbol of loyalty, in the picture), and Johannes Vermeer’s The Love Letter. 181 Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and states along a Southeast Asian frontier, 1865–1915 (New Haven and London, 2005): 3.

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F Part II G

Ideals

F Chapter 3 G

Order

The colonial imposition of order upon the landscapes of the Indies was carried out not only as a material extension of administrative aims, as expressed in the official motto rust en orde (peace and order). Ordering was also performed conceptually, in the realm of culture, with reference to historical Dutch aesthetic traditions as well as to parochial concerns and colonial ideals. Though, as technologies, taxonomy and cartography were in their heyday during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as modes of representation, they continued to inform colonial visions of Indies landscapes until well into the twentieth century. Taxonomy encouraged colonists to interact with the unfamiliar by venturing out into Indies landscapes, dissembling their parts, and rearranging them through classification. Cartography bestowed the prerogative of scrutiny on colonists seeking summaries and patterns in vast and diverse environments. Both disciplines fulfilled Dutch colonists’ desires for engagement with Indonesian landscapes while preserving a comfortable distance between themselves and their surroundings.

After 1817, the Governor-General’s palace in its botanical garden surrounds represented the ultimate symbolic nexus between administrative and environmental order in the Indies. For individual colonists, the practical task of ordering Indies landscapes began closer to home. Gardens were the domestic locus of Dutch desires to control the tropical environment, as attested to by the ubiquity of potted plants in colonial gardens. On its grandest scale, ordering involved the transformation of ‘wild’ spaces into plantation landscapes. Though crucial to the success of the colonial economy, this process was often treated with ambivalence by European observers. Painters usually avoided the subject of colonial agribusiness altogether, since the banal efficiency of plantations and factories was visually incongruous with the colonial preference for picturesquely ‘traditional’ landscapes in art. Few painters or photographers were inclined to represent landscapes that were deemed antithetical to colonial order. Wastelands and swidden fields, considered by the Dutch to be 3 – Order

unattractive as well as morally repugnant, were pictured by photographers in modes suitable to reportage. Otherwise, European observers seemed to find little worth embellishing in such landscapes. On the other hand, photographers in the service of government or business diligently documented the stages of plantation development, which often involved extensive deforestation and therefore resulted in the temporary disfigurement of landscapes. This was a particular source of concern for some colonial novelists, who detailed with horror the violence that marred the pre-plantation landscape.

These same novelists resolved the economic imperatives of colonialism with their moral repugnance for land-clearing (which, after all, was uncomfortably proximate to indigenous shifting cultivation techniques) by constructing narratives of patriotic redemption. Infrastructural projects were crucial to these narratives. Transport and communications networks connected the multiplying oases of colonial order throughout the Indies, helping to consolidate the notion of a greater Netherlands Indies empire. They also brought colonists in the Indies closer to one another, as well as to the landscapes of their memories in Europe. The provision of modern infrastructure also supported the image that some Dutch colonists held of themselves as benevolent rulers who were determined to improve the living standards of ‘the natives’ — an image that would assume official currency after 1900 with the introduction of the Ethical Policy. Roads and railways, together with the modern, regimented agricultural landscapes that colonists founded in the Indies, therefore became sources of great pride and patriotic investment for Dutch colonists. Writers were particularly inclined to explore this type of colonial patriotism, which promulgated the idea of an organic connection between Europeans and the ordered landscapes that they had forged in the wilderness. The notion of legitimate occupation that this narrative bestowed upon pioneering colonists helped to circumscribe the legal fact of their exclusion from rural land ownership, which was technically reserved for indigenous people after the Agrarian Laws were introduced in 1870. The discourse of ordering landscapes, then, was a crucial component of Dutch expansion in the late colonial period.

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F Designs for order: The curiosity cabinet and the ‘mapscape’ G

Taxonomy and the maintenance of curiosity cabinets were pursuits that widely occupied Europeans in the seventeenth century.1 The extensive collections of wealthy connoisseurs often attracted visiting scholars and enthusiasts from all over the Continent.2 In fact, it is very probable that such exhibits were predecessors to the modern museum.3 The appeal of curiosity cabinets was by no means restricted to scientific circles. On the contrary, taxonomy had already achieved widespread popularity in Europe by the time the Dutch first set out for the Indies. Identifying plants and fossicking for new species became so popular in Britain, for example, that botanical texts were published in the vernacular rather than in Latin.4

‘At its extreme’, Félipe Fernandez-Armesto has argued, ‘the collector’s obsession is an acute form of the civilising syndrome: wresting objects from their natural contexts and relocating them in a wunderkammer that only a human imagination would contrive.’5 Similarly, Ann Kumar has argued that the ‘use of systematic and quantifying templates [wa]s typical of the whole enterprise of Dutch commercial expansion and later colonialism.’6 Indeed, many colonists in the Indies took a keen and enduring interest in collecting and cataloguing natural specimens. Often these were Europeans whose talents and interests combined artistic aesthetics with scientific rigour.7 The draughtsmen who

1 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London, 1983): 271, 281. 2 EM Beekman, ‘Introduction: Rumphius’ life and work’ in The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet by Georgius Everhardus Rumphius (New Haven and London, 1999): cvi–vii. 3 Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities (New York and London, 2000): 125, 127–9. 4 Thomas: 282. 5 Félipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations (London, 2001): 380–1. 6 Ann Kumar, ‘Encyclopedia-izing and the organisation of knowledge: A cross-cultural perspective’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 155(3), 1999: 470. 7 The combination of artistic and scientific sensibilities was common in colonial scholarship during the ninteenth century — see Pyenson and Sheets-Pyenson: 230–4. For a discussion of these sensibilities in a very

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accompanied the expeditions of CJC Reinwardt (1773–1854) in the early nineteenth century were avid participants in the Dutch fascination for rariteiten (curiosities).8 The deployment of Reinwardt and the draughtsmen who accompanied him was part of a longer institutional tradition of scientific research in the Indies, begun in 1778 when the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences (Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen) was established — the oldest organisation of its kind in Asia.9 The principles of broadening botanical and scientific knowledge of the Indies upon which the Society was founded were carried on with vigour by individual enthusiasts in the nineteenth century. Antoine Payen, for example, owned a curiosity cabinet, and produced a series of careful drawings of Javanese plants, probably for the benefit of enthusiastic botanists in Europe.10 Payen’s colleague, AJ Bik, also completed a series of botanical engravings in the late 1820s, and managed to accrue a large collection of shells during his time in the Indies, which he took back to the Netherlands with him.11 A hundred years later, Walter Spies’ beleaguered final years in the Indies were spent on similar pursuits. After a stint in prison, he journeyed to the gardens at Buitenzorg in 1939 to recuperate, where he began an insect collection and embarked on a series of botanical watercolours.12

Colonial photographers and their audiences, too, were enamoured of the botanical genre. In 1879 the studio of Woodbury and Page produced a ‘still life’ of tropical novelties piled different colonial context, see John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge, 2002): 105. 8 It was in 1815 that Reinwardt embarked upon his first exploration of the Indies. He went on to establish the Botanic Garden at Buitenzorg, Java, in 1817. Reinwardt’s credentials involved several scientific appointments in the Netherlands, including as Director of the Cabinet of Natural History in Amsterdam: Marie-Odette Scalliet, ‘ “Back to nature” in the East Indies: European painters in the nineteenth century East Indies’ in Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren, and Jeannette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics (Amsterdam, 1999): 42. 9 Pyenson and Sheets-Pyenson, Servants of Nature: 353. 10 Scalliet, ‘ “Back to nature” in the East Indies’: 48–9. 11 John Bastin and Bea Brommer, Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia (Utrecht, 1979): 313–4; Marie-Odette Scalliet, ‘Beelden van Oost-Indië: De collectie Bik in het Rijksprentenkabinet’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 49(4), 2001: 372. 12 Ruud Spruit, Artists on Bali (Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur, 1997): 65.

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high upon a bench, a curtain half draped across the left-hand side of the picture adding a seventeenth century flourish to the scene [Plate 1]. Seed-laden cross-sections, fleshy bulges and thorny skins are displayed in all their variety; an anomolous rhinocerous horn (or elephant tusk?) poking into a cluster of rambutan adds a note of exotic interest. Photographs such as these were descended directly from seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish modes of reflecting on the bounty, as well as the transience, of nature.13 Their antecedents in the Indies are discernible in the drawings of renowned naturalists like Georg Everhard Rumphius, as well as in famous paintings like Albert Eckhout’s East Indian Market Stall, where attention to botanical detail is characteristically combined with the artist’s talent for social observation.14

In the Indies, the governing elite also maintained a private and public interest in recording and displaying curiosities. In Baren en Oudgasten, Rob Nieuwenhuys included a photograph of a well-to-do colonial interior prominently featuring a centrepiece of shells and corals [Plate 2]. The collection belonged to the Resident of Pasuruan and his wife, Trude Vallette, the sister of the notorious novelist Louis Couperus,15 who stayed in Pasuruan in 1899 while writing The Hidden Force. The small and rather awkward shrine to collecting that was erected in the centre of the room appears as though it may have been raised temporarily for the specific purpose of displaying the Valette family’s curiosities. The photograph perhaps was meant to serve as yet another ‘cabinet’ of sorts, a means of recording both avid taxonomy and artful display.

13 Alan Chong, ‘Contained under the name still life: The associations of still life painting’ in Alan Chong and Wouter Kloek (eds), Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands 1550–1720 (Amsterdam, 1999): 19–21, 26. 14 Reproduced in Kees Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia 1600–1950 (Amsterdam, 2002): 183. Zandvliet notes that the painting has traditionally been attributed to Eckhout, but that this provenance is by no means certain. For one thing, it is unlikely that Eckhout ever travelled to Java (which is, of course, no reason in itself why he could not have executed the painting). Eckhout is better known for being the first European painter to depict the landscapes and peoples of Brazil in the seventeenth century. His beautiful portraits of local peoples and still lifes from Brazil demonstrate a characteristic seventeenth century interest in the details of foreign landscapes, plants, and populations: see the catalogue produced for an exhibition at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, in 2004 — Quentin Buvelot (ed), Albert Eckhout: A Dutch Artist in Brazil (Zwolle, 2004). 15 In fact, Nieuwenhuys believed this picture was taken in her study — Nieuwenhuys (1998): 156.

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Before the advent of photography, colonial catalogues of nature had to be recorded by hand. Nicolaus Engelhard, Governor of Java’s north coast (1801–08) and patron of the Cornelius expedition to Prambanan, was a great collector of antiquities and made several drawings when he visited the temple complex in 1802.16 Governor-General Van der Capellen, who sponsored the Reinwardt expeditions, was an avid nature enthusiast and commanded quite a collection of specimens himself.17 It was Van der Capellen who had the monument to Rumphius (designed by Antoine Payen) built on the Oliphantstraat in Ambon where the great naturalist had lived. Governor-General Van Limburg Stirum paid homage to the same monument during a state visit in 1919.18 In 1905, only a few years before the author Maria Dermoût arrived on Ambon, an exhibition of ‘antiquities and curiosities’ from the VOC period was held on the island.19 In keeping with the nostalgia that colonists expressed toward Ambon for its role in VOC history, the little island was evidently also memorialised as the site of early Dutch20 botanical scholarship.

Dermoût’s own interest in natural ‘curiosities’ was stimulated during her time on Ambon, which began in 1910, and through her acquaintance with an elderly Dutch woman who became the model for the grandmother in The Ten Thousand Things.21 This novel is interwoven with references to Rumphius, some of them direct quotations from his work. Rumphius’ books are kept both as a reference guide and as a source of amusement in the Van Kleyntje household, which comprises a Dutch woman named Felicia, her son Himpies,

16 Zandvliet, (2002b): 269. 17 Scalliet (2001): 349. 18 Photographs of the visit are shown in HJ de Graaf, Ambon in Oude Ansichten (Zaltbommel, 1972): 10. 19 De Graaf: 52. 20 Rumphius was, of course, German (he was born in Hesse), but he has been appropriated by the Dutch for his eminent role in VOC scholarship on the Indies. Beekman and Nieuwenhuys include him in the canon of Dutch colonial literature — see Rob Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies: A History of Dutch Colonial Literature (Amherst, 1982): 28–32; and EM Beekman, Troubled Pleasures: Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies, 1600–1950 (Oxford, 1996): Ch 5. Further, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam still gives Rumphius (represented by a wax effigy) a room of his own in its permanent exhibition on the Netherlands Indies. 21 Rob Nieuwenhuys, Komen en Blijven (Amsterdam,1982): 262; Beekman, (1996b): 483.

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and her grandmother, who has lived on the island all her life. When Himpies is born his great-grandmother marks the occasion by preparing a curiosity cabinet for him, filled with objects from the bay nearby, as well as with items whose protective powers she has learned of through her acquaintance with local indigenous beliefs. Sea snails, for example, are kept as ‘sentinels’ in the drawer containing the most precious articles.22 Felicia, on the other hand, values the purely instructive qualities of the curiosity cabinet, particularly its use as an aid in ‘translating’ indigenous nature into something that her son could understand in Dutch. ‘Each new little shell had to be immediately looked up in The Curiosity Cabinet — what kind? What family? Order, class? The Latin names were too difficult but Felicia found that Himpies could learn the Dutch names by heart’.23

The grandmother’s approach to the curiosity cabinet in Dermoût’s novel has been characterised by EM Beekman as a sign of her empathy with indigenous attitudes to landscape. Beekman posits, in fact, that the grandmother views the items in the cabinet as pusakas (magical heirlooms)24 — a distinctly indigenous practice that was absorbed by this Dutch woman through her long residence in the Indies.25 PMH Groen has made a more cogent argument that, because the folktales surrounding these objects in the novel were derived from Rumphius’ antique texts, the grandmother’s susperstitions could more accurately be said to reflect the insidious colonial misperception that indigenous society remained perennially stable. Her sentimentality for these objects therefore reveals more about ‘colonial mentalities’ than Malukan beliefs.26 As for Felicia van Kleyntje, her relationship to the curiosity cabinet is unambiguously consistent with the colonial tendency

22 Maria Dermoût, De Tienduizend Dingen (Amsterdam, 1959): 86. 23 ‘Ieder nieuw schelpje moest dadelijk in de Rariteitkamer opgezocht worden — welk soort? Welke familie? Orde, klasse? De Latijnse namen waren te moelijk maar de Hollandse namen vond Felicia dat Himpies uit het hoofd kon leren.’ — Dermoût (1959a): 78. 24 Note that this is Beekman’s term. It is not certain whether a Javanese concept like pusaka has analogous meanings in Maluku. 25 Beekman, (1996b): 478–9, 482. 26 PMH Groen, ‘Ten Thousand Things and A Jewelled Hair Comb as historical sources: Fiction or fact?’ in Taufik Abdullah and Sartono Kartodirdjo (eds), Papers of the Fourth Indonesian-Dutch History Conference, July, 1983: 112–3, 115, 122.

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to approach Asian landscapes through the canon of European scholarship. Her affection for Rumphius is genuine, but she uses his texts like an encyclopaedia, a means of re-odering and decoding the landscapes around her.

F G

Together with the impulse to catalogue, Dutch colonial art demonstrated a strong tendency toward mapping and surveying, practices that had been crucial to the expansion and consolidation of the VOC maritime empire.27 Svetlana Alpers has argued that, in the seventeenth century, mapping became ‘a basic mode of Dutch picturing’.28 The modern distinction between maps and landscape painting was not yet applied in this period. Cartographers and painters received similar training and developed analogous skills and, perhaps more importantly, both types of representation were received as art.29 The Dutch were the first in Europe to use maps as decorative wall hangings,30 and although descriptive as well as narrative modes of landscape representation were common throughout Europe, the former dominated in the Netherlands.31 Indeed, the Dutch specialised in panoramic landscape views that emphasised topography — what might be called ‘mapscapes’. Already in the seventeenth century, Dutch painters accentuated ‘surface and extent’ in their work,32 and applied linear perspectives that gave the viewer a privileged vantage point from which to peruse a scene while maintaining his or her sense of distance from it.33

There were, of course, still important distinctions between maps and landscape paintings in Dutch art. Cartographers were in the business of providing information, especially

27 Kees Zandvliet, Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans and Topographic Paintings and their Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion during the 16th and 17th Centuries (Amsterdam, 2002): 21, 137, 202. 28 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983): 164. 29 Alpers: 136–7, 142; Zandvliet (2002a): 214, 252, 262. 30 Alpers: 120. 31 EH Gombrich, ‘Mapping and painting in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century’ in Reflections on the History of Art: Views and Reviews (Oxford, 1987): 115–6, 120. 32 Alpers: 139. 33 Alpers: 141–2.

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pertaining to the relationships between places, while painters invested their work with the less tangible qualities of atmosphere and local character.34 Seventeenth century patricians displayed maps and atlases in their homes to demonstrate their worldy knowledge to visitors and to educate themselves on history and politics as well as, more obviously, geography.35 In eminent households, maps were a symbol of Dutch maritime power. They graced the walls of both VOC and WIC (West India Company) headquarters, hung in the homes of company directors and in the palaces of stadholders, and were prominent in public spaces.36 From the 1650s, Amsterdam’s Town Hall was adorned with maps to suggest that it was at the centre of the world, and a painting of Banda Neira from the studio of the famed cartographer Johannes Vingboons had hung in the city’s East India House.37 Mapscapes like these were not widely seen until the early eighteenth century, when François Valentijn’s Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën was published. Previously, Dutch audiences had shown greater interest in images of places considered ‘civilised’, like Europe or China. Further, unlike the WIC, the VOC was less beholden to investors eager for information on its latest acquisitions, so there was little obligation to publicise charts of the Indies. Indeed, the VOC was notoriously secretive about the maps that it commissioned, fearing encroachments on its possessions from competitors if valuable cartographic information were to fall into the wrong hands.38

Like landscape paintings, maps were not always faithful representations of reality. Cartographers often altered features to create more pleasing pictures, and overstated vestiges of Dutch authority to emphasise the Republic’s presence abroad. In VOC maps and charts, harbour entrances and cities were thus commonly shown disproportionately large, since the infrastructure that supported trade was the feature that most concerned Dutch merchants.39 The well known Birds’-Eye View of Ambon (1617) attributed to David de Meyne provides a case in point [Plate 3]. The painting was commissioned by the Heeren

34 Alpers: 124. 35 Zandvliet (2002a): 310. 36 Zandvliet (2002a): 227, 245. 37 Zandvliet (2002a): 211, 220. 38 Zandvliet (2002a): 248–9. 39 Zandvliet (2002a): 236.

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Zeventien (‘Seventeen Gentlemen’, the Directors of the VOC) and adorned the council chamber of the Company headquarters in Amsterdam until the end of the seventeenth century. The view simultaneously summarised the topography of the island, its pertinence to the VOC, and Dutch perceptions of their position in the Malukan world. The size of European structures like Fort Victoria were exaggerated, and the clove trees that had drawn the Dutch to the island in the first place were impossibly distinct given the distant perspective adopted. However, while the Company was ebullient about its newfound dominance of the spice trade in Europe, De Meyne’s mapscape also suggested that the Dutch were realistic about their position within Asian trade systems. Hence, local villages were diligently marked and named on the map, and Asian vessels, including the distinctive Malukan kora-kora, crowded the harbour.40 As was only appropriate, for seventeenth- century European traders very much operated in an Asian world, sharing the seas with both Chinese and indigenous shipping.41

The dissolution of the VOC at the cusp of the nineteenth century coincided with the onset of the Napoleonic wars in Europe, and with an attempted revolution in the Dutch Republic. In the decades that followed, a permanent place for the Dutch in Southeast Asia became temporarily uncertain, and maps projected the Netherlands’ hopes for continued pre- eminence in the Indies. One image celebrating the Netherlands’ newfound monarchy after the restoration of peace communicated this desire for sovereignty abroad. Joseph Poelinck’s portrait of King Willem I shows the monarch indicating to a map of Java draped over a table, with possessions like Bantam (Banten), Jacatra (the old name for Batavia/Jakarta) and Cheribon (Cirebon) clearly marked [Plate 4]. The portrait was executed in 1819 during an important transitional juncture in Dutch overseas expansion. Control of the Indies had only recently been reclaimed from the British, while many other outposts (including the

40 Zandvliet, (2002b): 178–80. 41 Van Leur points out that in the seventeenth century, VOC understandings of Southeast Asia were firmly grounded in local history. Europeans knew they were operating in an Asian world, not (yet) a colonial one — JC van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (The Hague, 1967): 149–50, 165, 169. Susan Abeyasekere also noted that when Europeans first settled in Batavia, Chinese shipping was at least equal to European shipping — Jakarta: A History (Singapore, 1987): 23.

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Cape colony in southern Africa, Ceylon and several Indian territories) were permanently relinquished to the same rival. It was only two decades since the Dutch crown’s asumption of the Company’s former possessions. Poelinck’s positioning of the map therefore indicated a renewed, urgent Dutch interest in the Indies based on an historical claim to landscapes that had, literally, been drawn into the Netherlands’ own past.42

The prerogatives of mapping and surveying intensified during the nineteenth century as the boundaries of the expanded to include unfamiliar interiors as well as entirely new possessions. State patronage went to servants of science and exploration during this period. In the early nineteenth century the colonial government embarked upon a resolute program of investigating the unchartered regions of the Indies. Eager to exceed British scholarly efforts during Stamford Raffles’ brief reign (1811–15), the Dutch were determined to improve their knowledge of the Indies. Many early nineteenth century images of Java’s landscapes were therefore recorded by explorer-draughtsmen trained in technical drawing. Men like AJ Bik and his brother Theodorus, for example, were employed by the colonial government to accompany expeditions like those conducted between 1817 and 1826 by CGC Reinwardt.43 These missions took Reinwardt and his retinue to regions previously unexplored by the Dutch. In 1823, for instance, Theodorus Bik was among the first Europeans to investigate the southwestern peninsula of Java (now Ujung Kulon national park), then still sparsely populated and inhabited by wild animals.44 Much like early VOC maps, the work of Reinwardt’s draughtsmen was initially kept from public view to maintain secrecy.45 After Reinwardt returned to Europe, the colonial government established a Natuurkundige Commissie (Natural Sciences Commission) to continue his work. The Commission operated in the Indies for twenty years and published its results in Leiden between 1839 and 1844 as the Verhandelingen over de Natuurlijke

42 Zandvliet (2002a): 291. 43 AJ Bik was one of the draughtsmen for the Commission, working in 1817, 1819, 1820–1, 1823, and 1824 — Scalliet (2001): 350, 353–4, 356–9, 361, 363–4; Zandvliet (2002b): 281. 44 Scalliet (2001): 363; Peter Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and people in the Malay world, 1600-1950 (New Haven and London, 2001): 14, 180. 45 J de Loos-Haaxman, Verlaat Rapport Indië: Drie Eeuwen Westerse Schilders, Tekenaars, Grafici, Zilversmeden en Kunstnijveren in Nederlands-Indië (S’-Gravenhage, 1968): 207.

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Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Overzeesche Bezittingen (Treatise on the Natural History of the Dutch Overseas Possessions).46 Among the artists and draughtsmen that the Commission employed were Jan and Theodoor Bik, Pieter van Oort and later, the eminent German naturalist and explorer Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn.47 The Commission also employed the Belgian artist Antoine Payen, who bore the distinction of being the only individual ever appointed by government decree as official painter of the Indies.48

In the early nineteenth century, then, patronage for European art was largely provided by the colonial state rather than private enthusiasts and was actively directed toward filling the blank spaces, as it were, in Dutch concepts of Indies landscapes. Exploratory and acquisitive missions resulted in new maps of the Indies, as well as new images of its previously unknown interiors. This program had already begun during the eighteenth century, when the VOC extended the use of ledger maps in the Indies. These charts, which were standardised in the colonies before they came into regular usage in the Dutch Republic, were employed by surveyors to demarcate registered land titles for legal and fiscal purposes.49 In the colonial age, surveying remained an important tool of Dutch expansion in the Indies until well into the twentieth century. On Bali, topographical surveys, together with official estimates of the ‘potential productivity’ of land, increased tax revenues by up to 200% in some regions.50 On Java in the early nineteenth century, surveying was an equally crucial component of Dutch expansion, as illustrated in a drawing by JWB Wardenaar, Het Regentschap Probolinggo met Desselvs Gebergte aan de Strand te

46 De Loos-Haaxman: 203. 47 On Van Oort, see de Loos-Haaxman: 203. On Junghuhn, see EM Beekman, ‘Junghuhn’s perception of Javanese nature’, Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies, 17(1–2), 1996: 137. On the Bik brothers, see Scalliet (2001): 353–4, 363. 48 Bastin and Brommer: 324. The most comprehensive account of Payen’s life and historical context to date has been produced by Marie-Odette Scalliet, Antoine Payen: Peintre des Indes Orientales (Leiden, 1995). Payen had also worked for Reinwardt. 49 Zandvliet (2002a): 163. 50 Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca and London, 1995): 56. Robinson refers to dry rice fields in some areas.

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Zien (The Regency of Probolinggo with its Eponymous Mountains) (c 1800) [Plate 6].51 It shows a view of Probolinggo in East Java alongside the coast where the Postweg would later be constructed, with Wardenaar himself as the top-hatted surveyor seen from behind. Johannes Willem Bartholomeus Wardenaar (1785–1864) was born and died in Java, but moved through the landscapes around him as a Dutchman. He was trained as an engineer at the Dutch naval college in Semarang, along with HC Cornelius and AF van der Geugten. Wardenaar would later assist as a draughtsman on Cornelius’ expedition to Prambanan.52 In Het Regentschap Probolinggo, Wardenaar shows himself surrounded by the instruments of his work (desk and chair, scrolls of completed surveys) as well as the markers of his status as a European professional in the tropics (carriage, assistant, and payong-bearing servant). The plain before him is strangely vacant, like a blank sheet of paper that will only acquire meaning once it has been ‘filled in’ with information. Gazed upon and transcribed by a colonial surveyor, the landscape is then archived at the pleasure of the state, after which Wardenaar has presumably memorialised the mapping process itself by composing this image of it.

Abraham Salm’s mid-nineteenth century paintings suggest that he, too, saw Javanese landscapes reveal themselves as though yielding to the inquisitiveness of Dutch colonists — planters and administrators like himself. His In het Tengersche Gebergte, Oosthoek van Java (In the Tengger highlands, ‘Eastern salient’ of Java) shows an artist, possibly Salm himself,53 with a companion who surveys the scenery through field glasses [Plate 7]. The historic Dutch fascination, in both art and science, for manipulating images with lenses is evoked here:54 with his instrument, Salm’s assistant traverses great distances and brings scenes into focus that cannot be ascertained with the naked eye or the will of the mind, much in the same way that seventeenth century Dutch painters like Vermeer had employed

51 See Zandvliet (2002b): 275 for the dating of this piece. 52 Zandvliet (2002b): 270. Cornelius became director of the naval college before it closed in 1826: 272. 53 This is the supposition of Richard Hamblyn and Yu-Chee Chong in Java. Naar Schilderijen en Tekeningen van A Salm (Singapore, 1991): 62. 54 See Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (1983), ‘Ch 2 — “Ut Pictura, Ita Visio”: Kepler’s model of the eye and the nature of picturing in the north’. Here Alpers discusses scientific theories of sight and the use of the camera obscura, and their impact on Netherlandish painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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the camera obscura to secure ‘correct’ proportions while preserving intricate details.55

Colonists like Salm, gripped by cartographical fervour, often undertook mapping missions of their own volition. Richard Hamblyn and Yu-Chee Chong, who edited the most recent reproduction of lithographs based on Salm’s paintings, have gone so far as to suggest that enthusiastic planters, merchants, civil servants and military officers succeeded in charting most of Java by the end of the nineteenth century independently of government programs, in the interests of producing maps or painted panoramas.56 The latter were more Salm’s forté. His works combined a European aesthetic (the picturesque) with an empirical aim (to record).57 The titles of the lithographs based on his paintings were typically careful to specify Salm’s views, including the administrative regions that they belonged to. Colonial audiences could therefore be assured not just of Salm’s familiarity with and fondness for these landscapes, but were also able to locate his panoramas — perhaps by consulting a map, or an atlas — within the greater East Indian empire.

The impulse to codify spatial relationships between places and to formulate summarial views of colonial landscapes through mapping also permeated the way that colonists from diverse backgrounds spoke and wrote about their experiences and memories of the Indies. During the early 1840s, the German explorer and naturalist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn often found the misty atmosphere an impediment to his surveying work in Sumatra. On one occasion, his impatience got the better of him, and he constructed a platform in the treetops. There Junghuhn waited for the sky to clear so that he might chart the land from his perch. After three days of dogged lingering in the canopy, the sun finally emerged for Junghuhn

55 See Alpers, who comments on how the camera obscura made a distinction between the world and representations of it — Alpers: 37. See also the seminal and fascinating work of the artist David Hockney, whose own research and experiments strongly suggest that European art from the Renaissance onward developed along a course that favoured linear perspective and a photographic style of realism largely because of instruments like the camera obscura. His work includes a discussion of Johannes Vermeer — David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Techniques of the Old Masters (London, 2001): 12, 17. 56 Hamblyn and Chong: 72. This is an intriguing claim, with important ramifications for our understanding of Dutch colonial expansion, and is certainly worth further scholarly investigation. 57 Hamblyn and Chong: 20.

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and he experienced a surveyor’s epiphany, which he described in his notes as a map of the Batak lands that was instantly illuminated before him.58

More than a century later, the writer Maria Dermoût revisited her childhood in Java with the mnemonic aid of map-like images. At the close of her first novel, Nog Pas Gisteren (Yesterday) (1951), Riek, who was based on Maria herself, is almost grown up and preparing to depart for the Netherlands where she will complete her education. Riek reflects on the life that she will be leaving behind: ‘Java and its blue mountains, and the blue sea around it. In the north the Java Sea, in the south the Pacific; to the left the Sunda Strait, to the right the Madura Strait, as they were on the map in the schoolroom’.59 As a smaller child at the beginning of the novel, Riek is struck by this ‘large oblong map of Java’. ‘It was a beautiful map’, she remembers. ‘[T]he sea was blue and all the mountains were blue too.’60 This birds’-eye image of Java, historically entrenched in Dutch ways of seeing and representing the Indies, was the impression that seemed to endure for Dermoût, one that accompanied her from childhood into adulthood, and devolved quickly from direct experience into memory.

F Order writ large and small — Gardens61 and plantations G

In European colonies throughout Southeast Asia, the garden became a common metaphor for the novel landscapes that were encountered there. The garden was essential to Dutch constructions of nature. The crest of Holland, for example, featured a lion above a walled garden.62 This sensibility may still have been relevant to the early twentieth century. The artist Pieter Ouborg, whose tastes and pursuits in most other ways diverged from those of

58 From a quote in Beekman (1996a): 138. 59 Maria Dermoût, Yesterday (New York, 1959): 118. 60 Dermoût (1959b): 4. 61 Note that tuin, the Dutch word for ‘garden’, can also denote ‘yard’, a more general usage that is not of interest here. 62 Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge, 1995): 27.

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the typical European colonist in the Indies, wrote nostalgically of his countrymen’s regard for gardens in a letter to his parents from Malang in 1925: ‘Holland is a big garden in which the same constructivism shows up everywhere. Everything is thought out, constructed; ... a coherent world, in which is it pleasant to live.’63 Richard Grove has suggested that, for Europeans (and the Dutch particularly), gardens represented convenient symbolic reductions of vast, infinitely more complex worlds. In the context of biblical narratives, another favourite device of Europeans in the tropics, gardens also represented an opportunity for recreating paradise.64 The veneration for gardens was of course not restricted to European culture, as we saw in Chapter 1. Gardens were also important features of Indonesian royal palaces, and were modelled on Hindu and Islamic conceptions of paradise and the cosmos. For colonists, as we shall see further on in this chapter, the opportunity to forge a new world from what seemed in some parts of the Indies to be a blank canvas of wilderness was a significant component of colonial engagements with indigenous landscapes. Gardens represented a comparable venture on a smaller scale.

For the Dutch in the Indies, order in landscape began at home. Lawns with water features and neat rows of flowers and shrubs were not just a celebration of tidiness. Gardens were the individual colonists’ means by which to transform small patches of incorrigible verdure into controlled spaces. In some cases, gardens represented a cordon sanitaire separating private homes from the non-European world that began outside. In the novel Max Havelaar, the eponymous protagonist succinctly expresses the colonists’ watchful monitoring of their gardens, observing with frustration that ‘[w]henever the grounds of the house assigned to the official are too large to be properly tended, they quickly degenerate into wilderness, owing to the luxuriant growth of tropical vegetation.’65

63 Leonie ten Duis and Annelies Haase, Ouburg: Schilder (Amsterdam, 1990): 20–1. 64 On gardens in Christian Europe, see John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Recreation of Paradise (New Haven and London, 1981): 6, 10. Prest showed that when botanical gardens were founded in Christian Europe in the sixteenth century, they were associated with the recreation of earthly paradise (supposedly lost after the Fall). For an application of biblical narratives to the colonial tropics, see Grove (1995): 13. 65 Multatuli, Max Havelaar, of de Koffiveilingen der Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappy (Amsterdam, 1929): 244. Interestingly, the film that was made of the novel in 1976 makes even more of the dangers of an

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Of course, most Dutch households in the Indies depended upon Asian servants. Many were shared with Asian or Eurasian mistresses or wives, mothers, and children. The separation of Europeans from ‘Natives’, then, was never unmitigated. An extensive body of literature now exists that analyses growing colonial anxieties over racial mixing in the Indies from the latter half of the nineteenth century onward, and official attempts to prevent ‘contamination’ of pure Dutch lineages and lifestyles.66 Dutch colonial novels are a particularly insightful source on the tensions within colonial households that were shared with Asian women, in particular.67 Gardens, in this context, were perhaps a foil for the distinction between public and private, European and Asian, in the Netherlands Indies. Nevertheless, their omnipresence in colonial photographs and literature suggests that gardens were a sanctuary the Dutch felt they could not do without.

unkempt garden. In a segment that does not occur in the book, a dramatic encounter ensues between Max Junior and a snake that has emerged from the borders of the ‘compound’. See Max Havelaar (1976): Fox Film Corp, directed by Fons Rademakers, screenplay by Fons Rademakers and Gerard Soeteman. 66 See, for example, the works of Ann Laura Stoler — ‘Making empire respectable: The politics of race and sexual morality in 20th century colonial cultures’ in Jan Breman (ed), Imperial Monkey Business: Racial Supremacy in Social Darwinist Theory and Colonial Practice (Amsterdam, 1990); ‘Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34(3), July, 1992: 514–55; Race and the Education of Desire (Durham and London, 1995); and ‘A sentimental education: Native servants and the cultivation of European children in the Netherlands Indies’ in Laurie J Sears (ed), Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia (Durham and London, 1996). See also Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison WI, 1983): Chs 4–6; Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942 (Amsterdam, 1995): Chs 3–5; and Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘Colonial ambivalencies: European attitudes towards the Javanese household (1900–1942)’ in Juliette Koning, Marleen Nolten, Janet Rodenburg and Ratna Saptari (eds), Women and Households in Indonesia: Cultural Notions and Social Patterns (Richmond, 2000). 67 This observation has been made by Jean Gelman Taylor in her reflections on Dutch colonial literature in John H McGlynn (ed), Language and Literature: Indonesian Heritage (Singapore, 1999): 88–9. See also the study by Lily E Clerkx and Wim Wertheim, Living in Deli: Its Society as Imagined in Colonial Fiction (Amsterdam, 1991). The novels of Madelon Szekely-Lulofs, cited throughout this thesis, are a particularly good example of this genre.

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The humble flower pot was an important element of the colonial garden: white-washed, often set on a plinth, and planted with all manner of flowers and shrubs. In the 1950s, the Eurasian writer and journalist Vincent Mahieu recalled details that evoked the petty concerns of feuding neighbours in a short story entitled ‘The Fence’:

In both houses the wide gravel walk was flanked by rows of palms — at the Bergamins’ in earthenware pots and beautifully glazed Chinese jugs, at the De la Fosses’ in petroleum cans, which although neatly whitewashed, made a ‘poor’ impression, the more so because of the obvious and continually emerging spots of rust.68

The garden pot represented the pervasive urge among Dutch colonists to maintain bourgeois respectability by containing nature; by quarantining vegetation rather than placing it directly in the ground, where it was likely to attach itself to sympathetic organisms and overrun spaces that had been carefully domesticated. Sources from the Indies suggest that these pots were a veritable craze. Some photographs show them in ludicrous numbers, crowding lawns like so many squat, white sentries, and obscuring house fronts entirely. A photograph of a planter’s house in Surabaya shows the proud inhabitant waist high in pot plants that spread three abreast over his entrance stairs [Plate 10]. The grand homestead of prominent tea barons, the Holle-Van der Huchts, who lived on the Koningsplein in Batavia, featured pot plants cascading (in an orderly fashion) down the front staircase.69 The same trend was followed in the homes of the not-so-grand. The garden of Batavia’s English pastor, whose modest cottage was thatched with palm fronds, was also littered with pots.70

Rob Nieuwenhuys recalled these arrangements in his memoir, Faded Portraits (1954), written under the pseudonym E Breton de Nijs. His own family’s home in Batavia boasted an ‘entrance which, as was so common in older houses in the Indies, was flanked by a pair of heavy, six-sided pillars: stuccoed stone masses supporting a solid pediment on top.’

68 Vincent Mahieu, ‘The Fence’ in The Hunt for the Heart: Selected Tales from the Dutch East Indies (Kuala Lumpur, 1995): 26–7. 69 In Nieuwenhuys (1982): 22. 70 Nieuwenhuys (1982): 28.

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Inevitably, the yard contained ‘white-washed pots and kerosene cans filled with all kinds of flowers and plants’.71

Some observers viewed the garden pot disdainfully, as a vain attempt at imposing European concepts of order on the tropical landscape. Travelling through the Indies in the early 1920s, the artist-writer Jan Poortenaar soon tired of the colonial notion of a garden, which he perceived as a stilted affair:

Where garden should be, burgeon only the ubiquitous garden pots. In serried (sic) ranks and single file, in square formation or in geometric or amorphous figures, the heavy, earthenware pots are put down. Continuously bespattered with mould thrown up by the heavy rains, overgrown with moss, they form the eternal battle-ground of a struggle between the lime brushed on them for protection and the forces of nature. Flowers they seldom contain whatever may have been the original intention; but everywhere is green vegetation — palms and ferns, ferns and palms waving above this cemetery of pots.72

Two decades earlier, the novelist Louis Couperus had apprehended a paradox within the colonial garden, arising from what he viewed as the absurd imposition of European traditions on Javanese landscapes: ‘… anyone who is artistically inclined feels that there is nothing artistic or poetic in the whole colonial Indies,’ Couperus wrote, ‘where horse droppings are conscientiously piled high around roses in white pots for fertiliser, so that when there is a breeze the scent of roses is mingled with the stench of freshly laid manure.’73 It was this sort of scathing, perverse humour that offended some of Couperus’ more conservative Dutch readers and brought him infamy as a ‘decadent’ writer. The deeper significance of this particular observation, however, was Couperus’ suggestion that European and Javanese forms of nature did not mix gracefully, and that dignity would be restored to both parties if the Dutch would only cease Europeanising the landscape.

71 E Breton de Nijs, Faded Portraits (Amherst, 1982) [First published 1954]: 26. 72 Jan Poortenaar, An Artist in Java and Other Islands of Indonesia (Oxford, 1990): 32–3. 73 ‘… ieder, artistiek aangelegd, ze voelt in het kolonial Indië, dat in het geheel niet artistiek en poëtisch is, en waar men om de rozen in witte potten, nauwgezet, zoveel paardevijgen maar mogelijk stapelt als mest, zodat bij een bries de rosengeur zich vermengt met een fris besproeide meststank.’ — Louis Couperus, De Stille Kracht (Utrecht and Antwerp, 1982) [First published 1900]: 39.

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Couperus recollected his childhood in the Indies fondly, and was often critical in adulthood of the stuffiness and conservatism that he encountered among Dutch colonists.74 The tension between those Europeans who regarded themselves as Indisch (of the Indies) and those who prefered to think of themselves as Dutch made itself apparent in ostensibly trivial circumstances, such as attitudes toward gardens. Rob Nieuwenhuys, who was closely involved in the revival of Indisch and Eurasian culture abroad after Indonesian independence, remembered his own family’s views on newcomers from Holland in Faded Portraits. In the novel, Aunt Sophie, a formidable colonial matriarch, complains in a letter to relatives that the house they had vacated in the Indies was taken over by (‘newly arrived’ Europeans) who had ‘no feeling for a tropical garden.’75 Aunt Sophie — born, raised, and buried in Java — clearly believed her appreciation for Indies landscapes to differ qualitatively from those of new arrivals, who considered the tropical garden preposterously exotic. Marguerite Schenkhuisen, who also grew up in Java in the early twentieth century, remembered a garden (complete with flower pots)76 that was benign and beautiful by day — perfect for children to play in — but rather sinister at night. Though raised a Christian and taught European folktales,77 the Eurasian Schenkhuisen also absorbed a good many Javanese legends and consequently saw spirits and monsters in every bower once night had fallen.78 Maria Dermoût similarly filled her writings on Ambon with recollections of beautiful, though supernaturally animated, gardens.79

For some colonists, then, the Indies garden was as hybrid as their own genealogies and, indeed, Indies society, with Native and European features existing side by side (or in

74 See Nieuwenhuys (1982): 125, on Couperus and his fond recollections of childhood in the Indies, and the shock of returning to the Netherlands. For Couperus’ ambivalent attitude toward Dutch colonial society see Ian Baruma, ‘Louis Couperus: The Eurasians of the Dutch East Indies’ in The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West (London and Boston, 1996): 71. 75 Breton de Nijs: 97. 76 Marguerite Schenkhuisen, Memoirs of an Indo Woman: Twentieth Century Life in the East Indies and Abroad (Athens, 1993): 7. 77 Schenkhuisen: 45. 78 Schenkhuisen: 9. 79 These are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.

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uneasy combination). However, as we shall see later in this chapter, the attachment of long- term residents to local landscapes, particularly in their childhood, differed qualitatively from the patriotic investment that colonists nurtured through their efforts to control larger Indies landscapes extending far beyond their front yards. This was particularly true for early twentieth century colonists.

One garden encapsulated both the parochial and imperial ideals of Europeans in the Indies: the garden at Buitenzorg (contemporary Bogor). Governors-General had resided there since the mid-eighteenth century,80 in keeping with the gradual move of colonial elites out of hot, malarial Batavia (see Chapter 2). Buitenzorg — a fanciful Dutch name that meant ‘without care’ — was 60 kilometres inland from Batavia and an airy 265 metres above sea level.81 It was still a favourite colonial retreat in the twentieth century, as Nieuwenhuys recalled in Faded Portraits. Family trips to the famous Hotel Bellevue were often initiated by his father when Batavia became too stifling for comfort. In his memoir, Nieuwenhuys was still able to recall the road leading south from the capital, as well as the soothing drop in temperature as Buitenzorg approached.82

The botanical gardens at Buitenzorg, the first of their kind in Southeast Asia, were laid out in an area initially regarded by colonists as wasteland83 and constructed following Dutch principles of taxonomy that had been developed in Leiden during the seventeenth century.84 It was fitting, then, that the seat of government should ultimately relocate to Buitenzorg, since it came to reflect a paragon of order that was imported from Europe and imposed upon the tropics. The relationship between colonial authority and the Buitenzorg landscape

80 Abeyasekere: 43. Zandvliet (2002b): 297. Governor-General Van Imhoff first built the estate in the 1740s. In 1808, Daendels was the first to take up permanent residence there. 81 Zandvliet (2002b): 297. 82 Breton de Nijs: 70. 83 Zandvliet (2002b): 283. 84 Richard Grove shows that the major botanical gardens at Oxford, Paris and Edinburgh were based on the Leiden model developed in the seventeenth century, and that the Dutch were pioneers of the colonial botanical garden — Grove (1995): 91, 93. On the botanical garden at Buitenzorg, see Pysenson and Sheets-Pyenson: 158.

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was articulated in 1836 by Raden Saleh in his portraits of Governors-General Johannes van den Bosch and Jean Chrétien Baud.85 The portraits of both men featured the Buitenzorg palace in the background. Baud had been at the helm when a devastating earthquake struck the region in October 1834 and the palace was virtually destroyed. Its reconstruction, completed in 1837, seemed to renew Dutch confidence in the fortitude of their endeavours in the Indies, for artists continued to represent the new palace with vigour (this time — with characteristic Dutch respect for the whims of nature — only one storey high instead of two).86 The Governor-General’s summer palace and its surrounding gardens became possibly the most recognised landscape in the Indies from this period onward. It was pictured by countless writers, artists and photographers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, Buitenzorg was so famous by the nineteenth century that artists no longer felt it necessary to visit in person in order to depict it.87

The first European artists to represent the gardens had been AJ Bik and his brother Theodoor, who were based in Buitenzorg between 1816 and 1824 while the gardens were still being established.88 One of AJ Bik’s earliest sketches of the gardens and their surrounds, though rather cursory, falls well within the tradition of the colonial mapscape. His Gezicht op de Salak, vanaf de Achterzijde van Paleis Buitenzorg (View of Salak from the Rear Side of the Buitenzorg Palace)89 is both meticulously detailed and broadly panoramic, leading the eye through the navigation points of the landscape (Mt Salak, the Ciliwung River, paths through the gardens) while establishing its visible limits. Another image by AJ Bik, lithographed in colour by WJ Gordon in JJ van Braam’s Vues de Java (Amsterdam, 1842), places Mt Salak at the centre of a panorama that includes only a

85 Some of their relatives are buried at the cemetery in Buitenzorg (Bogor). Their portraits are in Zandvliet (2002b): 91–5. 86 Zandvliet (2002b): 297. 87 Zandvliet (2002b): 297. Drawings by Governor-General Baud’s adjutant in Buitenzorg form the basis of two images of the palace — one before, one after the earthquake — that now hang in the Rijksmuseum. The artist who executed the paintings, Willem Troost, never visited the Indies. 88 Scalliet (2001): 349–50. AJ Bik actually departed in 1822, but his brother stayed on. 89 Zandvliet (2002b): 282.

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shaving of the palace itself to the right of the picture.90 Vue du Parc et d’Une Partie du Palais de Buitenzorg (View of the Park and part of Buitenzorg Palace) shows Europeans in coat-tails and crinolines, accompanied by native servants bearing sumptuary payongs, promenading on the green immediately before the palace. The gardens themselves consist of manicured lawns, the ever-present garden pots, shrubs and trees, and a picturesquely meandering stretch of the Ciliwung River that leads the eye to the distant highlands. This landscape is not ventured into by the strollers, who seem to prefer to look upon it and perhaps take comfort in the constant application that it requires of its keepers, one of whom is shown hoeing in the bottom left corner. There is no chance of wilderness reclaiming the earth in this part of the Indies: indeed, in keeping with the panoramic artistic tradition, the surrounds of Buitenzorg lie before the viewer in the style of a mapscape, the very ideal of colonial order.

AJ Bik’s views of the palace itself were published as lithographs in several texts and albums that were produced in the Netherlands over a series of decades. These provide a salient example of the way in which popular images of Indies landscapes were recycled over long periods of time, becoming templates for other artists’ works and shaping public perceptions of what the colonies looked like. A well-known image of Buitenzorg by AJ Bik first appeared in the form of an uncoloured lithograph by P Lauters in CL Blume’s Rumphia (Leiden, 1835–49) [Plate 8].91 Later, a similar view from the opposite side of the palace, seen from the south, appeared as a coloured lithograph by WJ Gordon in JJ van Braam’s Vues de Java (Amsterdam, 1842).92 Both of these images look from the north toward the palace, which dominates the centre of the picture. Both include humans and animals that enliven the scene and provide evidence of a genteel environment. The Lauters reproduction shows deer reclining by the pond and a carriage, complete with liveried footmen, racing along the drive toward the palace. The Gordon reproduction shows swans

90 In Bastin and Brommer: 99. Bik’s colleague, Pieter van Oort, executed a similar panorama of Buitenzorg in 1830, in J Terwen-De Loos, Nederlandse Schilders en Tekenaars in de Oost, 17de–20ste Eeuw (Amsterdam, 1972): 68, this time without the gardens. It showed the landscape around Buitenzorg as an open park. 91 Bastin and Brommer: 234. The picture was entitled Nova Curia Bogoriensis, A Fronte Adversa Visa, Cum Vegetatione Ficus. 92 Bastin and Brommer: 99. The picture is entitled Vue du Palais de Buitenzorg, Prise du Parc.

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paddling in the water and places two gentlemen on horseback in the foreground. The work that is required to maintain the gardens is assiduously noted: groundsmen are clearly visible in both images. Significantly, little of the actual gardens is shown, the lithographers preferring instead to depict the seat of colonial government as a kind of manor within a spacious park. The gardens had to be inferred by those who were familiar with the location. Other depictions of Buitenzorg required the same deduction from viewers. One such image of the palace appears in the volume by Van Braam, and is ostensibly after Th Reijgers, yet is almost identical to the image by AJ Bik that was published in Blume’s volume [Plate 9].93 So too is JFC Reckleben’s image of Het Paleis te Buitenzorg, published in the Netherlands in the 1840s and 1850s.94

Bik’s original image of Buitenzorg as it was published in Blume’s Rumphia clearly dominated Dutch concepts of the palace and gardens well into the late nineteenth century. To the replicas by Lauters, Gordon and Reckleben, we might add Raden Saleh’s 1871 view of the Governor-General’s residence and the famous Kenari Avenue (established after the earthquake)95 from the south side of the palace. It displays the same ingredients that Bik’s lithographers had always favoured: fashionably attired Europeans, bare-chested ‘native’ gardeners, and the gleaming white palace with its Dutch flag proudly fluttering atop its central turret. Around the same time, the studio of Woodbury and Page produced a close- range photograph of the palace seen from the south,96 very like the paintings that preceded it. Bik’s image of the palace, it seems, persisted even in the age of photography.

F G

Perhaps the most forceful example of colonial order writ large on Indies landscapes was the

93 Bastin and Brommer: 234 — Vue Du Palais De Buitenzorg by WJ Gordon after Th Reigers in JJ van Braam, Vues de Java (Amsterdam, 1842). 94 Bastin and Brommer: 234 — from AJA van der Aa’s Nederlands Oost-Indië (Amsterdam and Breda, 1846-57). 95 Bastin and Brommer: 234 – from AJA van der Aa’s Nederlands Oost-Indië (Amsterdam and Breda, 1846-57). 96 Steve Wachlin, Woodbury & Page, Photographers: Java (Leiden, 1994): 72.

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commercial plantation. Its practical appeal resided in its association with the maintenance of the colonial economy which, even in the early twentieth century, was still largely based on agricultural production. Colonists in a wide range of professions, from administration to planting or trading, were personal stakeholders in the prosperity of Indies landscapes. Though regimented and repetitive, a monocultural estate was therefore directly commensurate with the interests of Europeans who had often made the journey to the Indies in the first instance to take advantage of economic opportunities. To a colonist, one might expect, the plantation was perhaps a thing of beauty.

Or was it? Certainly, from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of Dutch colonial rule, photographers produced countless images of orderly plantation landscapes as a kind of reportage for the benefit of government and industry. Often such pictures included the European and Indonesian labourers who maintained these landscapes. The methodical arrangement of plantations was shown at close range in these photographs: plants of a uniform maturity were spaced, equidistant from one another, in straight hedges that sometimes continued to the horizon, where they appeared as so many dense, unvarying stitches in a tapestry.97 The hierarchical structure of plantation communities was often visible too. Indonesian workers, male and female, were shown bending over crops under the watchful eyes of Asian supervisors (clad according to their status and usually not engaged in manual work) and European overseers (almost always in white suit and topi, and often in imperious poses).98 Plantation panoramas were also popular. The photograph

97 See the following photographs in the KITLV image collection: # 10735 shows a sugar plantation near Tegal in 1890, and another on Java from around 1900 is shown in # 12191; # 7764 and # 54856 show the sugar plantation Petaroekan, near Pemalang, in 1926; # 15777 shows a tobacco and rubber plantation at Tandjong- Morawa near Loeboekpakam around 1938. 98 See the following photographs in the KITLV image collection: # 5433 shows Asian supervisors policing a sugar plantation at Mojokerto in 1916; # 8018 shows Asian and European supervisors overseeing women working on a tea plantation at Sukabumi around 1925; # 12191 is from an album entitled Java; Het Rijk van Woud en Vulkaan Ontgonnen (Java; The Land Begotten from Forest and Volcano) (c 1900), an ironically idyllic pseudonym in the context of the prosaic image of plantation labour that it offers. It shows a European supervisor walking between the furrows of a sugar cane plantation, overseeing Javanese workers bent low over the cane shoots. Finally, # 18407 shows a very orderly tobacco plantation in Deli, c 1920, with a European planter posing with his Asian supervisors among the raised beds.

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included in Nieuwenhuys’ Komen en Blijven of an estate in West Java belonging to theejonker (tea baron) Karel Holle constitutes a fine example of this genre.99 Holle’s expansive plantation spills down the mountain side in neat columns that begin in the clouds and meander past the administrative headquarters, guesthouse and factory, flowing in all directions beyond the limits of the photograph — the very picture of organised fecundity.

However, in colonial paintings, cultivated land was often the backdrop for idealised portraits of agricultural labour, wherein native farmers were shown perusing their sun- bathed fields at a leisurely pace. Plantations formed but a distant component of larger panoramas, where cultivation was only implied and the emphasis was more commonly placed on tranquil settlement. Both these sorts of paintings and their significance in colonial constructions of the ideal landscape will be discussed at length in the following chapter. For now, it must suffice to say that the plantation landscape did not constitute a colonial ideal in the medium of painting. An orderly agricultural scene was certainly desirable, and a large dose of colonial patriotism was invested in landscapes that had been transformed for the purposes of commercial agriculture. However, these were not the landscapes that became renowned as images of beauty. It was photographs that comprised the dominant record of plantation landscapes, perhaps because the commercial estate was expected to be modern. Plantations were more commensurate with the kind of state-of-the-art technology that photography involved. Colonial estates were supposed to be efficient and rationally organised, run like an assembly line and laid out geometrically in contrast to the forests from which they were wrought and that still fringed their borders. Painters did not seem equipped to capture this kind of environment. Their province, as we shall see in the next chapter, was the archaic landscape, the rural idyll, not the new land forged from the old.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, European painters were beginning to make a controversial art of depicting the poor, the ill-favoured and the ugly, and were increasingly drawn to exposing the dark underbelly of Europe’s industrial landscapes.100 Indies painters

99 Nieuwenhuys (1982): 52–3. 100 On impressionist painters who were interested in this aspect of modern life, see Ted Gott, ‘Imaging the city’ in Caroline Mathieu, Monique Nonne and Ted Gott (eds), The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the

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were perhaps more sensitive to the unpalatability of such images — which tended to repel patrons — than their European counterparts. In the Indies, painters were reluctant to explore the unsightly elements of colonial landscapes (or society, for that matter). In Indies painting there were two particular enemies to Dutch notions of order and beauty: woest, or uncultivated and unused terrain, and ‘improperly’ used lands, especially those that were subject to shifting cultivation. Such landscapes were rarely committed to canvas because they were considered reprehensible, and few Europeans were inclined to hang what would have been considered ugly paintings on their parlour walls.101

Woest became a convenient label with which to render a region empty and expectant of colonial transformation. In Sumatra, woeste gronden referred to any part of Deli that was not under permanent cultivation — that is, both jungle and lands that were subject to shifting modes of agriculture.102 The term assumed similar meanings in other parts of the Indies. The whole of East Java was considered wasteland up until 1830, when it was brought under the cultivation system and coffee became the major export crop.103 As discussed in Chapter 1, it is very likely that the Javanese shared this preference for settled

Musée d’Orsay (Melbourne, 2004): 93, and Dominque Lobstein’s piece on Maximilien Luce in the same volume: 110. On realist painters, see Norbert Lynton, ‘Realism’ in Lawrence Gowing (ed), A History of Art (London, 1995): 773, 784. The work produced during Vincent van Gogh’s first serious attempts at oil painting provide an example from the Low Countries. In his early period, Van Gogh was interested in the lives of the poor weavers who lived in the town of Neunen, where he lived between 1883 and 1885. These dark, gloomy images differ markedly from the tones and subjects that interested him later. See John Leighton, 100 Masterpieces in the Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam, 2002): 4–8. 101 There is evidence to suggest that colonial squeamishness about paintings of landscapes that were considered unattractive also existed beyond the Indies. Tim Bonyhady has demonstrated that colonial artists in Australia often omitted charred stumps and ringbarked trees from their paintings because such realistic depictions would have found no buyers: Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth (Melbourne, 2000): 85–6, 178–9, 182, 215. 102 Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (Ann Arbor, 1995): 23. 103 So widespread did coffee become that, by mid-century, the government reckoned no unused land to be left in Java. In fact, in 1910 the government decided to relinquish some coffee stands to be reforested: Robert Hefner, The Political Economy of Mountain Java (Berkeley, 1990): 41, 47.

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landscapes. However, more than one scholar has pointed out an important distinction between European and indigenous attitudes toward non-cultivated spaces in the Indies: while colonists only valued land that had been injected with human labour, indigenous people often had no concept of ‘wasteland’. Such areas remained economically valuable as fallow land or sources of gathered products. Sparsely populated environments like forests and mountain peaks were also culturally meaningful to Indonesians because such places were often imbued with magical or sacred qualities, and because they were considered within people’s homelands.104

Shifting cultivation, that other blight on colonial notions of beauty, was loathed perhaps more energetically than woest. Colonists believed shifting cultivation to be an uncommitted, wasteful form of farming that betrayed a rootless, imprudent character in the seemingly uncivilised people who practiced it.105 In the novel Rubber (1931) by Madelon Lulofs, a new Dutch arrival is taken on a tour of a Sumatran estate by a colleague. After driving past a large colonial rubber plantation the two men come across smaller rubber gardens tended by Asians. ‘ “What a difference!”’ the new arrival observes. ‘ “How can that be?” ’. His companion explains that the natives ‘ “ … are too lazy to do anything well.

104 Noted by Jan Breman with reference to nineteenth century Java in his Control of Land and Labour in Colonial Java (Dordrecht, 1983): 14; as well as by Peter Boomgaard in his Children of the Colonial State: Population Growth and Economic Development in Java, 1795–1880 (Amsterdam, 1989): 80. Also noted by Robert Hefner for the inhabitants of the Tengger Highlands in twentieth century Java: 59–60. For Sumatra, the same observations were made by Karl Peltzer in the 1940s — see Planter and Peasant: Colonial Policy and the Agrarian Struggle in East Sumatra, 1863–1947 (The Hague, 1978): 71. See also my argument in Chapter 1. 105 Subsequent Indonesian governments have adopted the same disparaging opinion of shifting cultivation. Freek Colombijn has noted that the government’s transmigration programs of the 1980s (which were sponsored by the World Bank) were predicated upon the assumption that the Outer Islands were rich in ‘empty lands’. Many of these were, in fact, the habitats of shifting cultivators — see Freek Colombijn, ‘Global and local perspectives on Indonesia’s environmental problems and the role of NGOs’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 154(2), 1998: 316. Jean Gelman Taylor has noted specific examples in government policy toward and Maluku — see Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (New Haven and London, 2003): 352, 360. See also Robert Cribb, Historical Atlas of Indonesia (Surrey, 2000): 23.

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They start something and then neglect it”.’106

Lulofs’ writer husband, Laszlo Szekely, expressed similar frustration at the apparent willingness of Malay farmers to exhaust and abandon good agricultural land. ‘They will clear a piece of forest, burn the wood as best they can, build cages of palm leaves on long piles, plant rice in the soil just as it is, without ploughing or digging it up, and leave the rest to Tuan Allah.’107 Explaining shifting cultivation in terms of Muslim fatalism was a favourite topic of Szekely’s. He maintained that ‘[t]he did not exert themselves overmuch. If it pleased Allah the bananas and papaya fruits would thrive. If Allah wished the weeds and lalang grass to choke the corn, how could anyone prevent it?’108

Whatever the explanation that colonists offered for the practice of shifting cultivation, there was widespread colonial agreement on its undesirability. The practice was outlawed during the 1940s by both the British in Malaya and the Americans in the Philippines.109 Everywhere, shifting cultivation was viewed as a kind of rape of earth, and in the Indies was designated as such by the derogatory Dutch term roofbouw (plunderous cultivation). The American scholar Karl Peltzer, conducting fieldwork in Sumatra during the 1940s, discovered the word still in use among officials long after the method had fallen out of disfavour in scientific communities.110

Perhaps more surprising still, Maria Dermoût used the term roofbouw in her novel The Ten

106 ‘ “Wat een verschil!” merkte Frank op. “Hoe komt dat?”’ ‘John haalde zijn schouders op. ‘ “Ze zijn nu eenmal te lui om iets goed te doen … beginnen iets en laten dan weer verwaarlozen …”.’ — Madelon Lulofs, Rubber, Roman uit Deli (1933, Amsterdam): 62. 107 Laszlo Székely, Tropic Fever: The Adventures of a Planter in Sumatra (Kuala Lumpur, 1979): 252. 108 Székely: 254. 109 Karl Peltzer, Pioneer Settlement in the Asiatic Tropics (New York, 1948): 28. In the Philippines, shifting cultivation was allowed on lands with no commercial value if permission had been granted by the Bureau of Forestry. 110 Peltzer Germanified the term as raubbau, which he translated as ‘robber economy’ — Peltzer (1948): 21. Peltzer himself was no fan of shifting cultivation. He noted that land subjected to this kind of agriculture was ‘extremely ragged in appearance and do[es] not look at all like fields’: 5.

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Thousand Things, which was set on Ambon during the early 1900s but was written and published in the Netherlands during the 1950s.111 In the chapter entitled ‘The Professor’, inhabitants of the island of Buton were identified as shifting cultivators: ‘[T]hey built those large seaworthy praus and drifted in small troops over the seas, went every so often on land, burned off the jungle, built some huts, laid out some fields, caught a fish from the bay, and vanished again, everything behind them razed to the ground’.112 Later in the chapter a Dutch officer explains to an outsider how the residents of Ambon feel about the Butonese: ‘[N]aturally they are not keen on these half savages [halve wilden] who come to their land, burn whole stretches bare, wreak plunder on the earth [wat roofbouw plegen] and then sneak away’.113A group of Butonese are later charged with the murder of a Scottish professor of botany on Ambon. Although Dermoût does not dwell on the moral character of the killers so much as on the random senselessness of the event, the analogy between their casual connection to land and their lack of respect for human life is clearly implied.

One of the underlying colonial objections to wastelands and swidden fields was that their populations, being widely distributed and often mobile, were difficult to tax and control. Colonists were also dubious about non-intensive modes of agriculture because they did not adhere to European concepts of land ownership. When smallholders left land fallow to regenerate, to colonial observers it no longer seemed to belong to anyone. Such thinking had prevailed on Java, where Governor-General Daendels decreed in 1808 that farmers were to plant their rice fields ‘properly’ — that is, none were to be left fallow on pain of

111 Interestingly, roofbouw still appeared in the 1957 edition of Cassell’s Dutch-English Dictionary (Cassell and Co, London), roughly contemporaneous with Dermoût’s work. In it, the word is defined as ‘excessive cultivation’: 1145. However, the word no longer appears in the same dictionary by the 1970s, and appears now to have gone out of common usage, although colonial scholars and Indonesianists still appear to be familiar with the term. For example, Peter Boomgaard used it recently in Het Indië Boek (2001): 194. Here Boomgaard notes that it was the Dutch word commonly used in place of zwerflandbouw (shifting cultivation). 112 ‘ … zij bouwden die grote zeewaardige prauwen en zwalkten met kleine troepen over de zeeën, gingen hier en daar eens aan land, brandden het oerwoud af, trokken een paar hutten op, legden een paar veldjes aan, vingen een visje in de baai — en verdwenen dan weer, alles platgebrand achter zich latende.’ — Dermoût (1959a): 176. 113 ‘ … natuurlijk zijn zij niet gebrand op die halve wilden die in hun land komen, hele stukken kaal branden, wat roofbouw plegen en dan weer stiekum verdwijnen … ’ — Dermoût (1959a): 193.

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having one’s land confiscated and being forced to work for someone else.114 Jean Gelman Taylor has noted that, in this sense, colonialism actually encouraged the styles of farming that the Dutch found so attractive in the Indies. Commercial crops like sugar, for example, which competed with rice for flat, irrigated lands, forced farmers to grow food crops more intensively in order to make room for the competing cultivar.115

Another major colonial objection to shifting cultivation was that it detracted from the resources available to agribusiness.116 In Deli, planters and local farmers generally adhered to the jaluran system, whereby land was shared on a rotational basis between both parties for commercial and subsistence use.117 When, in the late 1930s, it was suggested that local farmers should be permanently allocated separate lands, colonial planters were outraged and resisted the idea. Once it became obvious that those lands barely classified as arable, the planters staged a hasty retreat. Since the Malays and Bataks were not ‘real’ farmers, the colonists now argued, it would be appropriate to stop pandering to their indolence by ‘sharing’ fertile land with them. Instead, the locals should improve their skills on marginal lands that demanded more ingenuity. To the chagrin of the planters, the colonial government did not share their views. On the contrary, it decreed that lands allocated to peasants should be certified as suitable for cultivation, or else made suitable at the expense of the planters.118 The government may have curtailed the rapacity of the colonists in this instance, but the episode illustrates the contempt in which indigenous farmers were held by planters, and colonists’ hostility toward competing claims to land.

It was ironic that the Dutch were so strongly opposed to shifting cultivation, since scholars generally agree that the plantation system, in East Sumatra, at any rate, effectively involved

114 Breman (1983): 13. 115 Taylor (2003): 242–3. 116 This objection to shifting (or ‘swidden’) cultivation, among several others raised by colonial and post- independence governments in Indonesia, has been discussed and cogently disputed by Michael Dove (1983), ‘Theories of swidden agriculture and the political economy of ignorance’, Agroforestry Systems, 1: 85–99. 117 Thee Kian-Wie, Plantation Agriculture and Export Growth: An Economic History of East Sumatra, 1863-1942 (Jakarta, 1977): 112. See also Peltzer (1978): 49. 118 Peltzer (1978): 102–4.

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planters alternating with local farmers as shifting cultivators.119 A cogent example was provided by Thee Kian-Wie in his analysis of the Sumatran plantation system. Thee calculated that planters in Deli sowed 20,000 to 25, 000 hectares of land with tobacco at any given time, while eight times that amount was left to lie fallow in preparation for the next rotation.120 Some colonial officials recognised this practice for what it was. In 1892, in defence of farmers being forced to adopt more intensive forms of cultivation, Resident Michielsen pointed out that planters too were shifting cultivators, merely on a larger scale.121 Indeed, western agricultural firms often used methods to clear forest in preparation for planting that were comparable to the techniques of Asian farmers, including extensive logging and the burning off of undergrowth.

Photographs of cleared land awaiting its destiny have survived the colonial period in files maintained by plantation companies, and by researchers with an empirical interest in plantation ecologies.122 Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk’s recent Het Indië Boek (2001) includes several photographs of what might be termed ‘transitional landscapes’ from the early decades of the twentieth century. One, taken in Sumatra around 1910 by the Nederlandsch-Indisch Landbouw Syndicaat (Netherlands Indies Agriculture Syndicate), shows young coffee bushes pushing through soil that is dotted with the remnants of the forest that stood there previously. Tree stumps and undergrowth, possibly razed by fire, are still visible.123 The same book also contains images of land cleared by Asians to make way for swidden: a north Sumatran ladang, for instance, where land is cleared after a rice

119 See, for example, Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial State in Southeast Asia (Delhi, 1990): 46; and Peltzer (1978): 40. 120 Thee: 91. 121 Peltzer (1978): 77. Parallels have also been drawn between colonial and indigenous modes of land use in other geographical contexts. In nineteenth century Australia, according to Tom Griffiths, aborigines and colonial pastoralists alike practiced ‘domesticated hunting’; were ‘nomadic within bounded territories’; used fire as a tool; and supported few people on large blocks of land — Tom Griffiths, ‘The outside country’ in Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths (eds), Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia (Sydney, 2002): 237. 122 Peltzer reproduced some of these, and took his own photographs, in his 1978 book Planter and Peasant: 164–6, 183. 123 Boomgaard and Van Dijk (2001): 196.

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harvest in order to lie fallow.124 Another landscape, this one pre-ladang, in , shows a cleared slope and a few ramshackle huts leaning into the hillside, with the remaining secondary forest in the background [Plate 11].125 These regions were still thickly forested and sparsely populated in the early twentieth century126 — that is, environments where shifting cultivation represented a common form of agriculture.

Images like these were notably absent from one of the better-known albums on life in the plantation district of Sumatra’s East coast. K Feilberg’s Views from Deli and the Batak Country (1871) consisted of photographs taken in 1869, at the end of the first decade of serious Dutch attempts to establish a plantation economy in the region. The album adopted a reasonably coherent narrative style, as was popular in the Indies during the nineteenth century (see Chapter 2). Sawah (wet rice) landscapes and pleasant panoramas, scenes from village life, portraits of working ‘types’ and local elites were all well represented in Feilberg’s album, but — significantly — there were no cleared landscapes awaiting cultivation, and certainly no images of shifting cultivation.127 A similar album, assembled between 1890 and 1905 and entitled Sumatra’s Oost-Kust, also omitted any evidence of unsightly transitional landscapes.128 It appears that those albums that were constructed in a narrative style and intended for sale to the European public sanitised the transformation of

124 Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 263. The photographer is unknown; the image was taken around 1920. 125 Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 422. This photograph is also anonymous, and was taken in 1923. There are occasional examples in other published collections of photographs. See, for example, Nieuwenhuys (1981): 88, which shows forest being felled in Deli, Sumatra, during the 1870s in order to make way for a plantation. Similar views are shown in Pierre Heijboer’s Klamboes, Klewangs, Klapperbomen: Indië Gewonnen en Verloren (, 1977): 91–2. 126 Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 194. Boomgaard provides figures for Sumatra and Borneo: in 1940, 61% of Sumatra was forested and had a population density of 17 people per square kilometre, while 77% of Borneo was forested and had a population density of 4 people per square kilometre. By comparison, in the same period only 24% of Java remained forested and it had a population density of 316 people per square kilometre. 127 Thanks to the staff of the KIT Fotobureau, Amsterdam, for providing additional information on Feilberg: Album # 373, KIT Fotobureau, Amsterdam. 128 Album collated by Stafhell and Kleingrothe, Medan Hotel, Medan: Album # 263, KIT Fotobureau, Amsterdam.

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Sumatran forest into plantations, omitting evidence of radical change to landscapes or to the people who lived within them.

Writers who were familiar with Sumatra’s booming Deli region were far more forthcoming about the unpalatable aspects of imposing colonial order on forested landscapes. Madelon Lulofs found pre-plantation sites to be positively hideous, and was considerably affected by the carnage that clearing involved:

That morning Meesters let the fire be put to the felled forest. It raged terribly. The trees fell across one another, giant trunks were reduced to smouldering, black stumps. The land was desolate: where the heavy trees were disturbed they ploughed up the ground, creating deep pits. The dilapidated ground was now smeared with ash and soot. Smoky, smouldering, black — burned stumps were scattered everywhere. Amidst this desolation stood a single giant trunk, tall and upright, that had been too large to fell. It was now piteously bereft of its crown and foliage. Its bark was scarred with burns. The fire had crept like an insatiable monster through the tree’s bowels, burning the mutilated trunk from the inside out; it had crept higher and higher, like a debilitating disease, before finally erupting in a blazing fountain at the top … A hellish heat emanated off the burned land …

Frank and Marion shuddered. A feeling of oppression settled upon them. The sight of this annihilated, murdered, chaotic land evoked a gloomy, plundered, blackened and charred churchyard …129

129 ‘Meesters had dezen ochtend voor den eersten keer den brand laten staken in het gekapte woud. Het vuur had verschrikkelijk om sich heen gewoud: in dezen eenen dag waaren de dwars over elkaar gevallen reuzenstammen opgebrand tot enkele nog nasmeulende, zwarte stompen. Troosteloos was de aanblik van dit land: waar de zware boomen waren omgestort, hadden zij den grond omwoeld, diepe kuilen gemaakt. Deze gehavende bodem was nu met asch en roet besmeurd. Rookende, smeulende, zwaar-aangebraande stronken lagen daar overal verspreid. En tuschen deze verwoesting stond, hoog en rechtop, een enkele reusachtige stam, die te groot was geweest om gekopt te kunnen worden, nu deerniswekend beroofd van kroon en takken, de bast met zwarte brandplekken. Het vuur kroop als een begeering monster door zijn ingewand, brandde den verminkten stam van binnen geheel uit; kroop hooger en hooger als een verwoestende ziekte, om eindelijk, een vlammende fontein gelijk, boven uit den top uit te laaien … Een helsche hitte sloeg uit de brandend land … ‘Frank en Marion huiverden even … Drukkende leegte het zich over hun gevoel, het aanzien van dit vernietigde, vermoorde land, een chaos, die denken deed aan een geplunderd, zwart, verkoold, triestig kerkhof … ’ — Lulofs, Rubber (1933): 64–5.

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Lulofs’ husband, Laszlo Szekely, abhored the jungle, but even he was repulsed by the ruins that were left of the forest when clearing began.130 However, this profound ugliness was clearly deemed necessary by the colonists in order for civilisation to be brought to the Outer Islands. Indeed, once a plantation began to assume its ‘finished’ form, many colonists appeared to find recompense in the transformation. In Rubber, a character momentarily revels in satisfaction at the achievements of her countrymen in Sumatra:

Her thoughts went to this great work that had been accomplished. Pride swelled in her, because the hands and the brains of men had been able to bring so much about. She looked at Frank. He too had taken his part in this mighty labour, in this fine work of making a wild region fertile. She assessed his part; she had seen the changes taking place around their house. For a moment she felt at one with this country, safe within these surroundings … It was like a new fatherland that they had created for themselves. 131

Though land ownership was forbidden to non-indigenous peoples under the Agrarian Law of 1870, those colonists who were not able to celebrate the imposition of order on Indies landscapes sometimes expressed their embitterment in terms of thwarted citizenship. Beb Vuyk’s The Last House in the World (1939) detailed the triumphs and sorrows of her own small family as they relocated from Java to Buru, Maluku, after the Depression left her husband unemployed. Vuyk, her husband, and their two children cheerfully struggle through the ‘adventure’ of establishing a successful kayuputih132 concession on the island, but are ultimately disappointed in their attempts to acquire a long lease over additional land from the colonial government. In the final pages of the story Vuyk laments that her children:

… are the third generation of De Willigens living on the tandjong [cape]. The people from Namlea and the

130 ‘Dark and precipitous, the fringe of the forest reared skyward. Tomorrow those trees, too, would lie felled on the ground. With no mercy, no compassion, the human will here squander its energy ...’: Székely: 131–2. 131 ‘Zij liet haar gedachten gaan over dit grootsche werk. Een trots zwol in haar, dat menschenhanden en -hersens zoveel tot stand konden brengen. Even, van opzij, keek ze naar Frank. Hij ook, had zijn aandeel te schatten; had zijn werk zien groeien en worden om hun huis heen. Een moment voelde ze zich één worden met dit land, vertrouwd worden met de omgeving … als een nieuw vaderland, dat zij zelf geschapen hadden.’ — Lulofs (1933): 99. 132 A plant-derived oil with medicinal qualities (see glossary).

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Alfurs [sic] from the interior call us “Tuan Tanah” [lord of the land]. But not a foot of this land will belong to these people; because of the shortsightedness and bureaucracy of a group of strangers they are doomed to remain strangers without land in their own country.

We had a task and it has been taken from us, we have attacked the wilderness and have been abandoned.133

While Vuyk’s frustration over the denial of a legacy for her children is the opposite of Lulofs’ patriotic triumph, both writers express the same core assumption: that an organic claim to land and thereby, a new kind of colonial citizenship, could be forged through European toil in and colonial stewardship over Indies landscapes.134 Both writers suggested that their ‘rights’, accrued through perspiration and emotional investment, took precedence over official attempts (however inconsistent) to maintain indigenous land rights. Individual Europeans, then, were sometimes more strident in their will to colonise than the state itself, and sought legitimacy for their efforts through a discourse of settler patriotism.

F Infrastructure and the expansion of colonial order G

Rudolph Mrázek has recently suggested that the advantages of transport technologies to the indigenous population of the Indies were a positive but ultimately incidental outcome of Dutch endeavours. Advances in communications and transport, Mrázek argues, were usually implemented to serve the interests of European communities first — the ‘rest’ of the Indies came later. It was no coincidence that the first telegraph line in the Indies, laid in 1856, connected two regions densely populated with Europeans — Weltevreden, a wealthy southern suburb of Batavia, and Buitenzorg, the Governor-General’s country seat and a retreat for holidaying Europeans. Further, although electricity was well established in the colonial capital by 1930, less than 0.2% of Java’s non-European population had access to it

133 Beb Vuyk, The Last House in the World (1939) in EM Beekman (ed), Two Tales of the East Indies (Amherst, 1983): 107. 134 After the war, Vuyk assumed Indonesian citizenship, attempting again to attach herself to the land that she felt she belonged to. However, disappointed with the political direction that her adopted country was taking, Vuyk returned to the Netherlands in 1958 — Beekman (1983): 21.

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in their homes.135 At the same time, in her memoir of late colonial Indonesia, Marguerite Schenkhuisen recalled the immense popularity of train travel among ordinary Javanese, who quickly grasped and took advantage of the benefits of mobility.136 Schenkhuisen’s observations are a reminder of the complexities inherent in interpreting development in colonial contexts.

Transport and communications infrastructure were certainly crucial to the expansion and consolidation of the Netherlands Indies empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but among colonists it was also an important marker of the Europeanisation of tropical landscapes. Colonial photographs and literature suggest that the Dutch were often thrilled with the appearance of new railroads in the Indies, particularly in ‘frontier’ regions like East Sumatra. Train travel came here late relative to other parts of the archipelago such as Java, where the first stretch of rail was completed in 1867.137 Sumatra would not gain a railway line for two more decades.138

In Madelon Lulofs’ novel Rubber, a Dutch planter couple revelled in the evocation of the Netherlands that accompanied the introduction of railroads to the Sumatran jungle, and celebrated the semblance of order that rail imposed on an environment that still seemed vast and impenetrable:

Right in front of the house ran a narrow-gauge railway. Twice a day the little trail rattled past ... It was a joy to Marion to hear the sharp whistle pierce the still day. She and Frank had watched it together when the train passed for the first time, ‘The real thing,’ they had said, elated. ‘Just as though we were in Holland.’

135 Rudolph Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton and Oxford, 2002): 93, 95, 161. See also Abeyasekere: 52–3, 57 — Gas lamps had been introduced to Weltevreden in the 1860s. Steam trams were introduced to Batavia in the 1880s because, according to Abeyasekere, it was such a ‘sprawling’ city, spreading over more than 10km. 136 Schenkhuisen, 1993: 43.Train travel was not as popular among Indonesian elites as it was among commoners — Mrázek: 11. Jean Gelman Taylor also notes that railways and rail travel helped forge a common sense of identity among the Indonesians who used it — Taylor (2003): 251. 137 Taylor (2003): 250. 138 Thee: 123.

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… It was as though civilisation had leapt, with one giant bound, into this primitive world …139

Photographs from roughly the same period as the setting of Lulofs’ novels present a similarly triumphalist view of railways penetrating a once insurmountable interior. An image of the Duivelsbrug (Devil’s Bridge)140 spanning a chasm on the west coast of Sumatra provides a case in point [Plate 12]. This stretch of rail ran between the port of Padang and the Ombilin gold mines. The photograph celebrates the conquering of nature through human engineering, and the glorious role that Europeans (discernible on the bridge in their distinctive colonial whites) played in this process. Those photographs that included figures often showed Europeans in prominent postitions astride their creations, sometimes perched defiantly on support structures as though to demonstrate the solidity of their achievements.141

Some photographs drew upon the mapping tradition in Dutch representations of colonial landscapes by emphasising the topography of order. An aerial photograph taken by the KNIL (Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger, or Royal Netherlands Indies Army) in 1938 over a region in Priangan shows a quintessentially constructed landscape: terraced fields

139 ‘… En vlak langs hun huis was het smalspoor gelegd. Tweemaal per dag ratelde daar het treintje overheen … Marian genoot, als ze het snerpend fluitje door den stillen dag hoorde gillen. Samen hadden zij en Frank staan kijken, toen het voor het eerste langs kwam. “Net echt!” had ze opgetogen gezegd … “Of we in Holland zijn.” … … Het was, of de civilisatie met één reusachtigen sprong hier was binnen gesprongen in deze oerwereld … ’ — Lulofs, Rubber (1933): 93. 140 Photographed by J Jongejans around 1915 — Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 258. 141 From the KITLV image collection: #10668 is a photograph from a collection accrued by FJG Janssens around 1900, and shows a Staatsspoorwegen (State Rail) suspension bridge in Priangan, Java, straddled by a white-clad European figure. Number 19335 shows a similar figure on a bridge over the river Mujur, south of Lumajang. Number 19362 shows another European in colonial whites astride a state rail bridge at Cisokan, east of Cianjur, on the railway line between Buitenzorg and Bandung. A small cluster of natives is visible off to one side. The photograph was taken around 1890. Image #19363 shows a different view of the same railway line, this time more obviously under construction, with the white-clad figure walking along an incomplete section of the bridge.

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that have been carved into the mountainside extend as far as the eye can see, and are traversed by a stretch of railroad that (precariously, in places) ploughs through rock and forest [Plate 13]. Three modern technologies are embedded in this image — photography, flight, and the railroad. The image has been taken from an aeroplane and therefore replicates the birds’-eye perspective long favoured by the Dutch in the Indies, reducing landscapes to the kinds of patterns and lines that characterise a topographical map. A similar effect is created in a photograph of a sugar factory on Java, also captured from the air in 1935 by the Department of War142 (no doubt intended, in the context of growing German and Japanese belligerence, to document the location of important colonial industries). The distance afforded here by the view from the air creates an image of a Javanese landscape that is almost indistinguishable from a map (or from parts of the Netherlands, for that matter). The land is compressed into two dimensions and subjected to the discipline of regimented grids.

Much of the infrastructure that the Dutch erected in the Indies involved genuine feats of engineering, most of them designed by Europeans and built by Indonesians. Roads in particular were a popular subject in nineteenth century arts and letters, notably the Postweg discussed in Chapter 2. This road had been the pet project of Governor-General Herman Willem Daendels during his reign between 1808 and 1811. It was intended to facilitate the speedy movement of Dutch troops to coastal outposts that might be threatened by British invaders. Built by Javanese labourers, many of them unpaid,143 the Postweg eventually connected the west and east coasts of Java along the island’s northern shore.144 Travel between major Javanese cities became much faster once the road was complete: the mail run between Batavia and Semarang, which had once taken up to two weeks, now took only three or four days.145

142 Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 115. 143 Peter JM Nas and Pratiwo, ‘Java and De Groote Postweg, La Grande Route, the Great Mail Road, Jalan Raya Pos’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 158(4), 2000: 710. 144 Zandvliet (2002b): 86–7. 145 Nas and Pratiwo: 712.

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Eduard Douwes Dekker (Multatuli) was a great admirer of the Postweg, referring to it in Max Havelaar as ‘a magnificent piece of work’ built by a man with ‘energy’ who ‘dared defy the unwillingness of the population and the discontent of the native chiefs in order to create something which merits the admiration of every visitor even to this day.’146 Dekker hinted here at the controversy that was stirred by Daendels’ use of forced labour and the many deaths that resulted when construction took the workers through malarial swamps and forests.147 Daendels’ eventual withdrawal from office was due not in small part to his brutal methods in building the Postweg — something that Dekker, with characteristic selectivity, failed to mention in his novel.

The paintings of the planter Abraham Salm (1801–76) provide some insight into the monstrous task it must have been to carve a road through Java’s mountainous landscapes. Several of his paintings148 show the remnants of sheer rock face where the Postweg had been etched into hillsides, as well as the mighty landscapes that colonists were carried through on the road’s winding course. In these paintings, Salm’s travellers were still on horseback and often armed. Passing through such landscapes was treacherous for Europeans, and though the Dutch rejoiced in their extended reach there was an element of insecurity, too, as demonstrated by the weapons that travellers were often depicted carrying.149

146 Multatuli (1987): 63. 147 Nas and Pratiwo (2002): 702. Daendels’ use of forced labour is surprising, given that he was a great proponent of liberty and democracy during the Dutch Revolution. In fact, he was exiled from the Dutch Republic in 1787 for being a ‘militant democrat’, and in 1798 he was involved in an attempted coup against the Orangists. He was later rewarded for his revolutionary fervour by the French, who appointed him commander of the Batavian army during the French occupation — See Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–1813 (London, 2005) [First published 1977]: 166, 342–3. 148 See Weg van Buitenzorg naar de Vallei van de Salakh (Road from Buitenzorg to the Salak Valley); Landschap in het Malangsche (Landscape in Malang); De Grote Postweg van Buitenzorg, langs het land Tjisaroa over den Mogamendong naar de Preanger Regentschappen (The Great Post Road from Buitenzorg, along Tjisaroa over the Mogamendong to the Preanger Regencies): Hamblyn and Chong: 40, 46, and 64 respectively. 149 See Abraham Salm’s Weg van Buitenzorg naar de Vallei van de Salakh (Road from Buitenzorg to the Salak Valley); Residentie Buitenzorg (Buitenzorg Residency), which shows armed travellers, and Landschap

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Overwhelmingly, however, Salm’s paintings of the Postweg were defiant against the dangers of the interior; indeed, parts of the road were quickly integrated into colonial lore. A section that passed through Sumedang in West Java was represented at least twice by different artists. The earlier image is attributed to Antoine Payen, who travelled through the region in 1822 in the company of Governor-General Van der Capellen. Payen evoked the steep climb through the highlands six years later in his painting entitled The Great Post Road near Rajapolah.150 Later, in the mid-nineteenth century, Abraham Salm represented the same stretch of road in his In Het Sumedangsche (In Sumedang).151 Salm’s image showed the Postweg just past the turn that Payen had paused before and, with characteristic interest in the picturesque, Salm gave the waterfall to the left of the road extra painterly attention. Both artists, however, emphasised the twin concern of colonial painters: that is, to demonstrate ‘the majesty of the Indonesian landscape, and the procedures by which Europeans sought to make it their own’.152

In their excellent article on the Postweg, Peter JM Nas and Pratiwo pointed out that comtemporary Indonesians appear reluctant to dwell upon the colonial origins of what is now known as the Jalan Raya Pos. Certainly, no part of the route commemorates Daendels.153 By contrast, in the nineteenth century the Postweg was regarded by the Dutch as one of the greatest achievements of colonial governance on Java. In 1838, twenty years after Daendels’ death, Raden Saleh painted a portrait of the Governor-General before the Postweg with his hand resting upon a map of Java and his index finger pointing to a sinuous line (the road) trailing across the paper [Plate 5]. The nexus between mapping, building and ruling demonstrated here was perhaps one that Saleh perceived in common in het Malangsche (Landscape in Malang), which shows Europeans travelling in a caravan formation with two riders at the vanguard — in Hamblyn and Chong: 40 and 47 respectively. 150 Pictured in Scalliet (1995) as plate 31. Payen also painted a view of the Postweg traversing the Cisokan river in Cianjur, Priangan: plate 36. 151 Pictured in Hamblyn and Chong: 66. 152 Hamblyn and Chong: 66. The authors make this statement with specific reference to Salm’s In Het Sumedangsche (In Sumedang), but I believe Payen’s version of the scene contains the same propensities. 153 Nas and Pratiwo: 723.

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with Poelinck, who had executed a similar image of the Dutch king almost two decades earlier.

The Postweg was also memorialised by photographers, who clearly appreciated its potential as a popular souvenir image that might evoke colonial journeys through Java. Rest stops were crucial to alleviate fatigue and the discomfort of bumpy roads. The photographers at the studio of Woodbury and Page cleverly capitalised on this feature of travel in their image of a pendopo (a roofed shelter where riders stopped to change horses), which might have been taken at numerous points along the Postweg. (In this instance, it was at Cisokan in Priangan).154 For Europeans, the Postweg also evoked memories of favourite places. At the turn of the century, O Kurkdjian photographed an ostensibly ordinary stretch of tree-lined road, alleviated by little else than a shed and a shabby gate. To Europeans in the know, however, this was the Postweg at Banju Biru, a village beside a popular colonial bathing spot and picnic destination near Pasuruan.155 The Postweg had metamorphised from a tool of Dutch authority in Indies landscapes to a site of colonial memory.

F G

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the imposition of order upon Indies landscapes by Dutch colonists was underpinned by a mode of looking, by a tradition of categorising and mapping that was the legacy of centuries-old empirical methodologies and art forms. Orderly, productive landscapes were favoured by Europeans and Indonesians alike, but in the context of Dutch colonial culture, order became a moral imperative as well as an aesthetic preference. Gardens, plantations, and modern transport networks all functioned as colonial paradigms of order in an otherwise foreign landscape.

This physical process of ordering was accompanied by a cultural co-optation of some Indies landscapes into colonial cosmology. The transformation of wilderness into

154 Wachlin: 81. 155 In Nieuwenhuys (1982): 65.

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civilisation, though often traumatic to observe, engendered a sense of patriotism and enfranchisement among colonists who had internalised the official pursuit of order. These sentiments, though sometimes inconsistent and often unrewarded, were a crucial component of Dutch expansion through Indies landscapes.

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F Chapter 4 G

Peace

Rust (peace) and its antithesis, onrust (unrest), were — like order and disorder — dual fascinations for European artists in the Indies. Tranquility was a moral precondition for legitimate colonial rule (not to mention a practical requirement for successful economic extraction), just as it had been for indigenous rulers. Dutch colonists distinguished themselves from their Asian contemporaries and predecessors, however, by constructing an elaborate mythology of non-intervention around the landscapes that they altered and intruded upon. The image of peaceful, historically continuous landscapes formed a cornerstone of this colonial fantasy. On the other hand, landscapes and people that defied Dutch control necessarily denied the fiction of benevolent rule, whereby interference in local ways of life was justified by modern improvements. Controversies like exploitation, discontent, warfare or famine had no place in colonial notions of a well-governed landscape, especially when such aberrations were caused by Dutch rule itself.

The panoramic view reassured Europeans that Indies landscapes were secure and pacified. Panoramas were the favourite device of painters, who subordinated the portrayal of cultivation to vaguer images of pastoral tranquility, perhaps because practicality dictated that peace precede prosperity. The perspectives that panoramas utilised reinforced the illusion that colonists monopolised the powers of surveillance and navigation in Indies landscapes. The broad sweep of the panorama also impeded close scrutinisation of landscapes, such that historical untruths became easier to gloss over. The rapid normalisation of Javanese landscapes in colonial art after the Diponegoro uprising serves as a cogent example of such idealising tendencies.

European artists also frequently supressed the radical changes that colonisation had brought to village communities in favour of images that peddled an almost pre-colonial impression of such landscapes. The fervour with which the Bali artists in particular clung to this fiction 4 – Peace

complemented the ideological vigour of colonial scholars and officials, who sought to erase the recent historical memory of Bali’s violent subjugation and replace it with the tenet that the Dutch constituted a benign presence in Balinese landscapes. Paintings of a peaceful Bali (and of a tranquil Java, where the Dutch also represented themselves as benevolent wardens of the countryside) functioned as opportunities to re-present the past by purging evidence of violence, coercion and discontent from the landscapes that colonists intruded upon.

Colonial representations of working landscapes were less consistent in their application of ideals. Painters continued to depict the landscapes of subsistence agriculture on Java, particularly rice farming, despite the rise of commercial agriculture and the emergence of modern utilities on the island. However, painters rarely ventured into the newly-forged plantations of Sumatra, where photographers and writers were scarcely able to avoid the reality of colonial intervention in indigenous landscapes and its disruptive consequences.

F The panorama G

Pre-twentieth century Indonesian art includes no real equivalent to the European panoramic tradition, focussing instead in its landscape views on narrative scenes and, very often, the fine details of nature (see Chapter 1). These more intimate indigenous perspectives on landscape were no doubt born of a greater familiarity with the tropical environment, and with a long history of imbuing nature with particular cultural meanings. In the Netherlands Indies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on the other hand, panoramas were a favourite genre among European artists. They were especially popular with painters, who drew upon a lengthy European tradition (particularly well-developed in seventeenth century Dutch art) of depicting landscapes of sweeping dimensions from stable vantage points using linear perspective. The panorama also had much in common with the modes of looking employed by surveyors, who inevitably accompanied the progress of official colonisation in the Indies. It was no coincidence, then, that trained draughtsmen often utilised the panorama in the landscape images that they created for their own pleasure. Individual colonists adopted charting and painting as interchangable leisure pursuits. It is

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sometimes difficult, therefore, to separate the imperatives of mapping and surveillance from more innocently aesthetic pursuits in colonial art.

The works of Abraham Salm (1801–76) serve to illustrate. Salm began his professional life as a merchant in Surabaya before trying his hand at tobacco planting, which turned out to be a lucrative conversion.1 Salm’s interest in painting and drawing was inspired by the beautiful countryside surrounding his plantation in Malang, and by other sites familiar to him throughout Java. His work drew acclaim from admirers in the Indies and the Netherlands, and throughout his life many of his paintings were selected for show at international colonial exhibitions.2 In the late nineteenth century Salm’s work began to reach an even wider audience through print. Between 1865 and 1872 a volume of chromolithographs after Salm’s paintings was published in Amsterdam.3 The collection, which attained some popularity in the Netherlands,4 expressed Salm’s concerns as a planter and a colonist. His favourite subjects were pastoral views, scenes from village life, and sites along the Groote Postweg, all of which Salm attempted to record ‘faithfully’ while retaining their ‘picturesque’ character.5 Strictly speaking, these kinds of objectives were no longer fashionable in Europe by the time Salm was painting, where the ardent landscape of the Romantics had more recently been popular.6 However, Salm’s parochial, idyllic images

1 John Bastin and Bea Brommer, Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia (Utrecht, 1979): 81–2; and Marie-Odette Scalliet, ‘ “Back to nature” in the East Indies: European painters in the nineteenth century East Indies’ in Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeanette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics (Amsterdam, 1999): 77. 2 Thirty of Salm’s paintings were shown posthumously at the 1883 colonial exposition in Amsterdam — Richard Hamblyn and Yu-Chee Chong, Java. Naar Schilderijen en Tekeningen van A Salm (Singapore, 1991): 14. 3 See Hamblyn and Chong: 11, for original publishing details. 4 Hamblyn and Chong: 18. Salm’s work was generally well known in colonial circles, and was exhibited on several occasions in the Netherlands and at international colonial exhibitions. 5 Hamblyn and Chong: 20. 6 Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth Century Art (London and Boston, 1984): 22. The authors argue that romanticism reached its zenith in the mid-1840s — around the time when Salm first arrived in Java (1843). And yet his work shows little evidence of the style that had so recently been popular in Europe.

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seemed to appeal to the conservative interests of colonists who prefered placid views to dramatic vistas. After all, Salm, like many other nineteenth century painters, was a career colonist whose profession as a planter and administrator made him a personal stakeholder in the maintenance of peaceful landscapes. 7

This partiality can be observed in painted views like Het Land Tjitrap (The Countryside of Citrap), a region located in the highlands south of Batavia [Plate 1]. All the conditions of nineteenth century colonial notions of beauty are met in this image: the scene is bucolic but legible, the viewer being able to enjoy the visual pleasures of the rustic countryside while ascertaining its economic significance as a fertile plain. In this particular painting, Salm combined local landmarks like the mountain range and meandering river with indicators of the colonists’ presence, like the settler’s cottage and the faint patchwork of fields. Salm was careful, however, to refrain from dwelling overmuch on the source of the planters’ wealth, preferring instead to construe Europeans as benevolent guardians of pastoral tranquility. Prosperity is implied in the fertile, sedate appearance of the landscape, but profit for its own sake is incidental to Salm’s painterly notions of beauty — hence the remote reference to agriculture. Similarly, in his Gezicht op het Kawische Gebergte en op de Tabaks- Onderneming (View of the Kawi Mountains and Tobacco Estate) the viewer is immediately impressed by wide, luxuriantly-watered grazing lands and languid shepherds, but one must squint to identify the drying sheds in the background, which probably belonged to Salm himself.8 The tobacco plantation referred to in the title is all but invisible.

Panoramas like those composed by Salm were common in nineteenth century colonial painting and drew upon a lengthy tradition in Dutch landscape art, where the illusion of objectivity was conveyed by distance and, typically, an elevated vantage point. These

7 Susan Abeyasekere notes that, before the 1870 Agrarian Laws, there were few ‘private’ European individuals in the Indies — most were employed in the civilian or military arms of government: Jakarta: A History (Singapore, 1987): 59. 8 John Bastin, ‘Introduction’ in Richard Hamblyn and Yu-Chee Chong, Java. Naar Schilderijen en Tekeningen van A Salm (Singapore, 1991): 13.

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devices imposed order on a view by allowing the eye to be guided through the landscape.9 Like their seventeeth century Dutch predecessors,10 Indies panoramas typically allowed the viewer to survey, summarise and navigate through a landscape. At a single glance, the panorama allowed colonists to take stock of their position as well as their possessions. Panoramas, then, were an instrument of authority and a reminder of privilege for colonial elites who sought to represent their elevated positions by literally taking the high ground in views of Indies landscapes. A panoramic perspective also enabled artists to gloss over the details of daily life and focus instead on overall impressions. For landscape painters, this usually involved conveying a sense of harmony, emphasising the relationship between a munificent environment, contented peoples, and their benevolent custodians.

Images of peace became particularly important during times of political instability, when the colonial ideals of wealth and tranquility were threatened. The Diponegoro (or Java) War11 between 1825 and 1830 serves as an example. The conflict was instigated by Prince Diponegoro (1785–1855), whose designs on the were supported by followers opposed to Hamengkubuwono V and his allies. The uprisings led by Diponegoro were directed against the Dutch and Javanese agents of exploitation and unjust rule, and against Europeans and Chinese whom the prince regarded as infidels unfit to rule devout Muslim Javanese.12 Initially, Diponegoro’s campaign to sever Yogyakarta from its supply lines in the countryside succeeded, but from 1829 the Dutch began to regain control of the hinterland, and in 1830 the prince himself was captured.13

Diponegoro’s demise comprises the theme of one of the most famous Dutch colonial history paintings of the nineteenth century. Executed by Nicolaas Pieneman in 1830 and

9 Simon Schama, ‘Dutch landscapes: Culture as foreground’ in Peter C Sutton (ed), Masters of 17th Century Dutch Landscape Painting (London, 1987): 66–7. 10 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983): 141–2. 11 Jean Gelman Taylor points out that the nomenclature differs according to historiographical perspective. Western accounts usually refer to the conflict as the ‘Java War’, while official Indonesian histories often use ‘Diponegoro’ — Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (New Haven and Lonson, 2003): 234. 12 Taylor (2003): 232–3. 13 Taylor (2003): 234.

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commissioned by Diponegoro’s nemesis, General HM de Kock, the portrait shows the abortive negotiations that culminated with the Dutch renegging on their promise not to arrest Diponegoro.14 The prince was thereafter exiled and died in his prison on Fort Rotterdam.15 For the Dutch, the conflict resulted in 15,000 military deaths (a number far outweighed by the 200,000 Javanese casualties), and renewed efforts to govern Java ‘indirectly’ with the aid of sympathetic indigenous rulers. The Dutch also launched an extensive campaign to train colonial troops in the art of guerrilla warfare, to map the island’s interior, and to reinforce military strongholds.16 Victory belonged to the colonists, but it came at the price of disquiet over the security of their possessions.

Contemporary Dutch artists seemed unwilling to give substance to these fears, preferring instead to bolster the myth of perpetual tranquility in the colonies. In keeping with the triumphant nature of Pieneman’s portrait, images of Javanese landscapes around 1830 emphasised the restoration of peace, order and prosperity to war-ravaged Central Java. Three years after the formal conclusion of the war, a series of lithographs were published in Leiden in Mémoires sur la Guerre de L’Ile Java de 1825 à 1830 (Recollections of the War on the Island of Java from 1825 to 1830). The lithographs, executed by W van Groenewoud, were based on images by Major FVHA de Stuers (1792–1881), General de Kock’s adjutant and son-in-law, whose presence at the capture of Diponegoro was immortalised in Pieneman’s painting.17 Vue de Magellang (View of Magellang) (1833) shows an exchange between dignitaries before an unusually systematic backdrop [Plate 2]. A village clusters in the mid-ground, neatly fenced off from a road that meanders into the distance. Tidy copses of trees alternate between clearly discernible fields. The landscape is productive, accessible and subdued. The negotiations in the foreground are a mere formalisation of the calm that has already — so it appears — settled over the countryside. Many of the other images of Javanese landscapes included in the De Stuers album are similarly sanitised, depicting the recently war-ravaged countryside as curiously tranquil,

14 Kees Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia 1600–1950 (Amsterdam, 2002): 325. 15 Taylor (2003): 235. 16 Zandvliet (2002b): 325. 17 Zandvliet (2002b): 330.

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orderly, and undisturbed.18

Those who were trained in readiness for battle, like De Stuers, were strongly represented among the ranks of artists.19 This was no coincidence. The military was a prominent component of colonial society. Officers had their own club in Batavia, the Concordia, and frequented other buildings, like the Schouwburg (theatre), in the capital.20 Military training fostered an attitude toward Indies landscapes that emphasised their strategic importance, and often involved the development of skills in topographical draughtsmanship. Officers who dabbled in painting and photography often produced images of landscapes that were

18 Many of the images from De Stuers’ Memoires are available on the KITLV website, in the image catalogue under the keyword search term ‘Diponegoro War’. 19 It is not possible to provide a comprehensive list here, but the better known painters, draughtsmen, writers and photographers with a military background included: HC Cornelius (1774–1833), draughtsman and Major in the KNIL and famous surveyor of the temple complex at Prambanan, Central Java, between 1805 and 1807 — Leo Haks and Guus Maris, Lexicon of Foreign Artists Who Visualised Indonesia (1600–1950) (Utrecht, 1995): 62–3; Jean Demmeni (1866–1939), KNIL officer, member of Topographical Service and photographer — Leo Haks and Paul Zach, Indonesia: Images from the Past — Photographs: Jean Demmeni (Singapore, 1987): 9; Leo Eland (1884–1952), a painter who started out in the KNIL — Ruud Spruit, Indonesian Impressions: Oriental Themes in Western Painting (Wijk and Aalburg, 1992): 30; QMR ver Huell (1787–1860), painter and naval officer — Bastin and Brommer: 339; JF ten Klooster (1873–1940), a painter and draughtsman who started out in the KNIL and was posted in Sumatra during the Aceh War — Haks and Maris: 50, 150; FW Junghuhn (1809–64), an explorer, draughtsman and writer who began his life in the Indies as a KNIL medical officer — Bastin and Brommer: 321; FVHA de Stuers (1792–1881) and his younger brother, HJJL de Stuers (1788–1861), both draughtsmen. The former participated in the Java War and eventually became Governor of Maluku. He was also the son-in-law and private secretary to Governor-General HM de Kock. The latter also had a distinguished military career, rising to Commander of the KNIL in 1830 — Bastin and Brommer: 335–6; CWM van de Velde (1818–98), a naval officer and marine painter — Bastin and Brommer: 337–8; JWB Waardenaar (1785–1864), a military draughtsman who assisted with the Prambanan restoration, and with a British survey of East Java during the Interregnum — Bastin and Brommer: 340; FC Wilsen (1813–89), draughtsman, KNIL officer and member of the Topographical Service in Batavia — Bastin and Brommer: 341. 20 Abeyasekere: 56.

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informed by an interest in tactically significant landmarks, like peninsulas and fortresses, as well as perspectives that enabled authoritative looking. Two image-makers who lived almost a century apart — one a watercolourist, the other a photographer — serve to illustrate this union between the interests of the colonist with the techniques of the landscape artist.

Willem von Geusau (1814–72) arrived in Batavia in 1840 as a KNIL officer and gradually worked his way to the rank of Major just before his retirement in 1857.21 In accordance with his occupation and with the seaborne origins of the Dutch Indies empire, many of Von Geusau’s paintings feature Dutch strongholds that cling to coastlines and defend vaguely- defined interiors.22 Some of Von Geusau’s panoramas reveal a fastidious inclination toward symmetry and a desire to produce comprehensive surveys of a location. His Gezigt op Noessa Kambangan (View of Nusa Kambangan)23 shows Karang Bolang, a battery on an island off the south coast of Java. Its complementary image is Gezigt op Tjilatjap (View of Cilacap),24 a view of the garrisoned coastline as seen from Nusa Kambangan. Similarly, the fortresses Belgica and Nassau on Banda in Neira en de Vuurberg (Neira and the Volcano) [Plate 3] are shown from the perspective of a perkenier’s (spice-grower’s) residence on the island of Lontor, opposite Banda. The reverse image, Het Zonnegat (The Sun Gap) [Plate 4], reveals Orang-Datang, the perkenier’s house on Lontar from which Von Geusau painted the view of Banda Neira. Both sets of panoramas emphasise the position and major features of defensive landmarks.

21 Yu-Chee Chong and Richard Hamblyn, Views of Indonesia (1848–57) by Willem von Geusau (1814–1872) (Singapore, 199?) [Exact publication date unavailable]: 17, 19. 22 Von Geusau’s watercolours, once misattributed to his younger brother, Arnold, have been re-issued in a volume by Chong and Hamblyn entitled Views of Indonesia (above). Panoramas make up a significant minority of the paintings in this collection. Von Geusau appears to have made six watercolours of Dutch fortresses, three on Java and three in Maluku. All were accompanied by text which the authors attribute to Von Geusau himself, whom the authors consequently believe to have visited these locations personally: 14, 16, 20. 23 Chong and Hamblyn: 56. 24 Chong and Hamblyn: 59.

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Von Geusau’s focus on the picturesque qualities of these landscapes might have been explained by the reality of Maluku’s eclipse, both economic and political, by Java in the previous centuries. The artist’s inclusion of Belgica and Nassau, however, was also a reminder that the fortification of the spice islands remained an important concern for the Dutch. The strongholds that Von Geusau pictured were garrisoned during his time there,25 a fact that cannot have eluded the scrupulous draughtsman. No doubt his painterly distance from the scene helped Von Geusau erase even the suggestion of instability from his tranquil images.

Jean Demmeni (1866–1939), whose photographs reveal less evidence of his military training than Von Geusau’s paintings, still remained unable to resist, it seemed, adopting the perspective of surveyor in some of his images. Demmeni produced some of the most well-known photographs of the Indies, including the famous 1897 portrait of Resident de Vogel, stiffly arm-in-arm with Sultan Pakubowono X of Surakarta.26 His expeditions to Borneo at the turn of the century resulted in several volumes of published photographs,27 and his work repeatedly graced the pages of Dutch school textbooks and travel publications.28 Demmeni was the son of a Madurese woman and a Frenchman who became a Major General in the colonial army. He followed his father into the KNIL in 1887 but shifted to the civilian Topographical Service seven years later. Thereafter, Demmeni performed duties very much in keeping with the colonial imperatives of rust en orde: in 1917 he became head of the topographical service (where he continued to work freelance after his retirement a decade later), and he occasionally performed forensic work for the Netherlands Indies police force.29

Among the great diversity of images of the Indies that Demmeni created, one in particular recalls his professional training. A photograph of the agricultural land around Mount

25 Chong and Hamblyn: 58, 68. 26 See Haks and Zach: 11. 27 Haks and Zach: 9. 28 Haks and Zach: 7, 10–11. 29 Haks and Zach: 9, 11, 13.

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Singgalang in West Central Sumatra shows a man (possibly a local farmer) from behind, squatting in the foreground as he surveys the terraced rice fields extending into the distance before him. The elevated perspective and the broad, panoramic scope of the picture invites the viewer to imitate the photograper’s surveying glance [Plate 5]. For Demmeni, such a manner of looking over and through Indies landscapes was no doubt second nature, inculcated by years of topographical training and — as, perhaps, for the viewers of his photographs — by the paintings of artists like Salm and Von Geusau that preceeded him.

F The village landscape G

The ‘traditional’ Indies village was crucial to Dutch notions of a peaceful landscape. This was particularly true for colonial impressions of Java and Bali which, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, constituted arguably the best-known destinations for Europeans in the Netherlands Indies.30 Here, the village represented an anti-wilderness, a repository of civilisation that placated colonists who appeared sometimes to be uncomfortable with vast, uninhabited landscapes. Indeed, painters seemed loathe to portray a sweeping view of rustic countryside without including at least one hut and some human figures, if not an entire settlement. The triangular peaks of bamboo huts are frequently visible in colonial landscape paintings, often serving as solitary indicators of human settlement that enliven otherwise vast expanses of countryside.31 Perhaps these painstakingly peopled landscapes reflected the reality of growing populations, particularly on Java.32 Then again, perhaps some colonists were insecure in vast, empty lands. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, Europeans were not particularly enamoured of nature unfettered by culture in the tropics: attitudes toward what was regarded as ‘wasteland’

30 Adrian Vickers proposes that Java was the best known island in the Indies until 1930, when it was eclipsed by Bali — Bali: A Paradise Created (Singapore, 1996) [First published 1989]: 98. 31 See especially the village scenes of Abraham Salm (1801-76) and Jacob Dirk van Herwerden (1806-79), who were near contemporaries and who both went into the colonial civil service. On Salm, see Hamblyn and Chong. On Herwerden, see Bastin and Brommer: 320, and Scalliet (1999): 78–80. 32 In 1800, the estimated population of Java was 3–4 million people. By 1900, it was 30 million people — Robert Cribb, Historical Atlas of Indonesia (Surrey, 2000): 69.

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provide an object lesson on this point. Further, Chapter 7 includes examples of colonial writers who explored the existential anxiety of Dutch colonists when confronted with monumental Indies landscapes. The inclusion of people and dwellings in colonial landscape art served to transform frighteningly wild spaces into rustic country scenes that were perhaps more palatable to those familiar with the gentle countryside of the Netherlands.

For Dutch painters, the favoured image of the Indies village landscape entailed the appearance of a ‘traditional’ settlement occupied by docile, compliant natives. After all, people who were dispersed haphazardly across landscapes were difficult to account for, draw revenue from, or restrain in times of upheaval. The village, then, represented a landscape inured against disorder by virtue of its ostensibly sedentary inhabitants, anchored to the soil by their community. In the early twentieth century, Bali was represented in European art as just such a placid outpost of the Netherlands Indies. The island became an obligatory destination for a continuous stream of European artists, most of them Dutch, including Rudolph Bonnet (1895–1978), Isaac Israels (1865–1934), Willem Hofker (1902-81), Adrien Jean le Mayeur de Merprés (who was in fact Belgian) (1880–1958), WOJ Nieuwenkamp (1874–1950), Walter Spies (1895–1942), Hendrik Paulides (1892-1967), and Jan Poortenaar (1886–1958), to name but a few.33 These artists signified a notable break with the past in that, unlike their nineteenth century forebears, they were not in the Indies on business of the kind that involved commerce, agriculture or administration. Pilgrims to Bali were far more interested in cultural pursuits, and tried to live as much as possible from and for their art.

The painter, musicologist and Bali afficionado extraordinaire, Walter Spies, epitomised this new style of Indies artist succinctly. Spies was born in Moscow to a German family, an ancestry that saw him imprisoned in Russia for the duration of the First World War. (He no

33 Some excellent texts on the lives and works of these artists are: On Bonnet, Hofker, Le Mayeur, and Nieuwenkamp — Ruud Spruit, Artists on Bali (Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur, 1997) : 37–44, 74–5, 95–7, and 13–19 respectively; On Israels — Spruit (1992): 24–6, and Anna Wagner, Isaac Israels (Amsterdam, 1969); On Spies —Hans Rhodius and John Darling, Walter Spies and Balinese Art (Amsterdam, 1980); On Paulides — Peter EM Hamman, Hendrik Paulides: Painter and Narrator (Singapore, 1997). Little seems to be available on Poortenaar. The best overview of his life and work to date appears in Haks and Maris: 212.

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doubt recalled this incident with some nostalgia twenty years later, when the experience was repeated in rather less comfortable circumstances. The Russian internment occurred under lax security, according to Spies’ biographers, who maintain that he was able to freely indulge his scholarly fascination for local ethnic cultures during his detention).34 Two decades of good fortune pursued Spies after the war. His talent for painting was vindicated with a first successful exhibition in 1919, followed by others in the 1920s.35

Triumph in Europe was not to captivate Spies’ attention for long, however. In 1923 he departed for Java, where he attracted the patronage of Sultan Hamengkobuwono VIII (r 1921–39) of Yogyakarta.36 With the exception of the KPM (Koninklijke Paket Maatschappij, or Royal Packet Company), which hired him as a tour guide for distinguished visitors to Bali,37 indigenous elites were to remain Spies’ major sponsors throughout his time in the Indies. Spies worked as conductor of the Sultan’s European orchestra until 1925, when he came into the employ of Cokorda Gede Agung Sukawati of Ubud.38 Here Spies immersed himself in a flourishing bohemian society of expatriate European intellectuals and local Balinese. He had a house built for himself in Campuan, overlooking the verdant valley below.39 He also became curator of the Bali Musuem at Denpasar40 and, together with the artists Rudolph Bonnet (Dutch) and I Gusti Nyoman Lempad (Balinese), as well as the Cokorda, Spies became one of the founding members of

34 Rhodius and Darling: 11. 35 Rhodius and Darling: 13, 17, 25. 36 Rhodius and Darling: 21. 37 Jeannette ten Kate, ‘Painting in a garden of Eden: European artists in Bali during the first half of the twentieth century’, in Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakle, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics (Amsterdam, 1999): 132. Vickers notes that the period in which Spies was active coincided with the birth of tourism on Bali. There were 100 visitors a year in 1930, and 250 a year by 1940 — Vickers (1996): 97. 38 Rhodius and Darling: 29. The Sukawati family cooperated closely with the colonial government, as discussed in Chapter 1. See also Vickers (1996): 140, 159. 39 Rhodius and Darling: 43. 40 Ten Kate: 133.

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Pita Maha, an oganisation dedicated to preserving the integrity of new Balinese art.41

Though popular among the Balinese and with his European friends, it seems that Spies made some enemies among certain Dutch officials who were envious of his prestige.42 Spies himself was none too enamoured of the local bureaucracy, whom he regarded as stuffy and bourgeois.43 Spies’ ambivalent relationship with Dutch officialdom no doubt compounded the difficulties that he found himself in during December 1938, when he was imprisoned on the charge of sex with a (male) minor.44 Spies’ inclination toward masculine companions had already been confirmed in Europe, where he had formed a couple of close relationships with other artists.45 In Bali, where homosexuality among young unmarried men was acceptable in indigenous society,46 it was the Dutch authorities who took exception to Spies’ relationship with a local man. Spies was arrested for his proclivities in 1938, in the context of a government crackdown on so-called moral deviance.47 Rudolph Bonnet, who was also homosexual, evaded the round-up — a fact which has led some of Spies’ biographers to suspect that a personal vendetta motivated the officials who signed off on his arrest.48 When Spies was released in September 1939,49 it was to be for a short

41 Ten Kate: 136, 138. Pita Maha also exported selected artworks to overseas buyers. It was disbanded when war broke out in 1942. 42 Hans Rhodius has suggested that a colonial official bore a grudge against Spies for his popularity and fame, and that this (unnamed) official prevented Spies’ release from prison in 1942, when Germans in the Indies were rounded up — Rhodius and Darling: 51. Spruit (1997): 62, has noted that Dutch officials on Bali were not, in general, in favour of the bohemian expatriate community, whom they viewed as a ‘bad example’ to the ‘natives’. 43 Vickers (1996): 112; Spruit (1997): 58; Ten Kate: 132. 44 Rhodius and Darling: 45; Michael Hitchcock and Lucy Norris, Bali: The Imaginery Museum. The Photographs of Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete (Oxford, 1995): 37. 45 Rhodius and Darling: 13, 15. 46 Vickers (1996): 106. 47 Rhodius and Darling: 27, 43, 45. For a compelling recent account of Spies’ life in Bali that places his homosexuality in the broader context of European colonialism, see Robert Aldrich, Homosexuality and Colonialism (Routledge, 2003): 161–5. 48 See footnote 42, above. Rudolph Bonnet left Pita Maha, from which Spies had been expelled, in a show of solidarity with his friend — Spruit (1997): 43. 49 Rhodius and Darling: 49.

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time only. Hitler’s army invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, and soon afterward all German nationals in the Indies were detained. Spies spent his final days on a ship bound for Ceylon,50 and drowned with the other prisoners on board when, in January 1942, the ship was bombed en route by Japanese fighter planes.51

Spies was arguably the most renowned among a troupe of artists and intellectuals who poured into Bali during the early decades of the twentieth century. Adrian Vickers has credited him with single-handedly constructing the popular modern view of Bali as an apolitical tropical paradise. Indeed, most of Spies’ eminent friends — including the writers Miguel and Rose Covarrubias, the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and the writer-musicologist Colin McPhee — formed their first acquaintance with the island through Spies.52 Today the paintings from Spies’ Balinese period are remarkably well known, despite the fact that most of his work appears to be held in private collections.53

Spies’ paintings, though revealing his absorption of some influences from Balinese art and culture,54 overwhelmingly demonstrate the aesthetic preferences of the European colonial elite. Spies’ paintings pulsated with trees and exotic blooms, but roadways, dwellings and gardens remained neatly partitioned in a semblance of recognisable order. His village scenes55 were quaintly rustic and distinctly tropical, but also tidy and articulate. His

50 Spruit (1992): 19. 51 Rhodius and Darling: 51. 52 Vickers (1996): 105. 53 The Musuem Puri Lukisan has only reproductions, and rather poor ones at that, and the Dutch museums that have originals of Spies’ work are very few. 54 Including themes from Hindu-Balinese mythology, as well as the spatial orientation of many of Spies’ paintings. For example, in The Landscape and its Children, Gunung Agung appears in the north-east corner of the picture, which is a sacred direction in Balinese cosmology. As in many traditional Balinese paintings, the top half of the picture concerns itself with the divine and the bottom half with the ordinary human world — Rhodius and Darling: 73. 55 See, for example, Desadurchblick (View through a village) (1935), Landschaft mit Schattenkuh (Landscape with a Shadow Cow) (1938), and Palmendurchblik (View Through Palms) (1938), all pictured in Rhodius and

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combination of tropical exuberance with orderliness satisfied the dual requirements of Dutch viewers for landscapes that were at once peaceful and prosperous, as well as authentically exotic. Iseh im Morgenlicht (Village of Iseh in the Morning Light) (1938), perhaps Spies’ most elaborate village fantasy, shows a hamlet bathed in almost evangelical shafts of light that spill over steeply terraced fields trickling down the hillside — nature’s sanctification of the harmonious relationship between settlement and cultivation [Plate 6].

The crucial point of interest for European observers, which was pursued with vigour in Spies’ art, was the notion that early twentieth century Balinese landscapes and the people who lived within them were umbilically linked to the ancient past. One of Spies’ favourite methods by which to indicate the antiquity of Balinese landscapes was to include two or more horizons within a single view. In Wasserlandschaft (Water landscape) (1933) a second horizon, viewed through a dark tunnel of verdure in the lower half of the painting, is reflected in a tranquil pool of water. Rehjagd (Deer hunt) (1932) features a similar example of a secondary horizon viewed in a reflecting pool. In Wasserlandschaft the concentric circles (one of Spies’ hallmarks)56 created by the boatman’s paddle on the mirrored surface amplify the sense of repetition and continuity [Plate 7]. At the very least, as some analysts have proposed, the double skylines in this painting constitute two spaces and times unified on a single canvas.57 One might go further, however, and argue that Spies’ paintings represented an attempt to locate the historical past as a living presence in Bali’s contemporary landscapes.58

Life in Bali, Spies seemed to suggest, had a timeless resonance that continued undisrupted to the present. In reality, nothing could have been further from the truth. Spies’ paintings were extraordinary given that the 1920s and 1930s were characterised by significant upheavals within Balinese landscapes and society, and that the incorporation of South Bali

Darling. (Note that German titles are often given in Rhodius and Darling’s book, which are not unlikely given than Spies was of course himself German). 56 Pointed out by Rhodius and Darling: 25, 31. 57 Rhodius and Darling: 37. 58 Rhodius and Darling touch on this interpretation in their argument that Spies’ work reflects a preoccupation with ‘eternal nature’ and with the ‘philosophical, cosmological’ quality of life in Bali: 37.

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into the Dutch empire in the first instance had been formalised by violence. Spies’ work reflects perhaps the clearest example of the colonial fallacy of non-interference in Bali; but other artists and intellectuals, not to mention the colonial establishment itself, were also conspicuously silent on the dislocation that followed in the wake of colonisation.

Trauma had marked the occasion of South Bali’s final subjugation to Dutch rule.59 In September 1906, in the face of an advancing colonial army, the Raja (king) of Badung and his retinue staged a puputan (mass ritual suicide) in response to a Dutch military advance, and over a thousand people were killed.60 The incident was repeated in 1908 at Klunkung which, like Badung and Tabanan, initially resisted Dutch incursions. (The eastern kingdoms of Bangli, Gianyar and Karangasem, on the other hand, had acceded to the colonists and were subsequently rewarded with ‘indirect rule’).61 Soon after these events, Dutch authorities set about erasing the brutality of the conquests from official accounts. That the puputans might have entailed resistance to Dutch aggression (a view that Indonesian nationalists were subsequently to adopt) constituted a ‘scar on the liberal imagination of the Netherlands’ that, according to Adrian Vickers, ‘had to be healed’ expediently.62 During Bali’s colonial period the puputans were consistently explained in official and scholarly circles as an inevitable, if unfortunate, occurance that did not affect the majority of by virtue of their distance from their immoderate rulers.63 Indeed, official justifications for the conquest of Bali included the notion that the Dutch were relieving ordinary Balinese of the despotic burden of their overlords.64

The idea that the indigenous aristocracy on Bali were an artificial imposition on pre- existing modes of social and political organisation had formed a cornerstone of Dutch

59 Colonial expeditions to North Bali had already begun in the mid-1840s — Cribb (2000): 122. 60 Vickers (1996): 35. In the same year, the Raja of Tabanan and his son committed suicide after having been forced to capitulate to the Dutch — Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca and London, 1995): 24. 61 Robinson: 24–5. 62 Vickers (1996): 91. 63 See Vickers’ discussion on the judgments of Gregor Krause and Vicki Baum — (1996): 100, 111. 64 Robinson: 24.

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colonial thought from the late nineteenth century.65 The concept of the dorps republiek (village republic) was first proposed by Thomas Stamford Raffles, who (inappropriately) compared early nineteenth century Balinese communities with his observations of settlements in India.66 During the 1870s, the idea was further developed by FA Liefrinck, a scholar-official who served as Resident of Bali and Lombok between 1896 and 1901.67 Liefrinck’s paradigm was based on his examination of communities in the mountainous regions of northern Bali, where he noted that commoners would seek alternative rulers in other villages if dissatisfied with the burdens imposed by their current wardens.68 Liefrinck’s theories gained popularity among Dutch elites, even if they failed to grasp the nature of kingship in Bali, where rulers often exercised power over people rather than territory.69 In South Bali, for instance, neighbouring households often paid allegiance to and were protected by separate overlords rather than a single regional authority. South Balinese rulers also santioned large-scale internal migrations well into the nineteenth century — an action that challenged the colonial preference for sedentary populations governed by a centralised authority.70

It was from the moment of Dutch colonisation that historical European attitudes toward Bali were conveniently abandoned. From the late sixteenth century, Bali’s reputation among European seafarers had been as a place of danger and savagery. Adrian Vickers has shown that it was only after the Dutch subjugation of South Bali in 1908 that the island

65 Robinson: 28. 66 Vickers (1996): 22–3. 67 Vickers (1996): 83, 89. 68 Henk Schulte-Nordholt, Bali: Colonial Conceptions and Political Change 1700–1940 (Rotterdam, 1986): 2–3; Vickers (1996): 83, 90. Robinson makes specific reference to Tabanan and corvée labour: 60. 69 Schulte-Nordholt: 16–19, 21; See also Jane Drakard, A Kingdom of Words: Language and Power in Sumatra (Oxford and New York, 1999): 17, 223, 259, 310. Drakard considers the Central Sumatran kingdom of Minangkabau, where kings did not extend their authority through a strictly territorial or bureaucratic structure. Instead, they exercised power on the periphery of their realm through royal letters and seals. The Dutch viewed these objects as ‘fictions’ of royal authority and sometimes even doubted the existence of the kings, so fixated were they on the idea of a centralised state. 70 Schulte-Nordholt: 16–9, 21.

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began to be viewed as a benign tropical paradise.71 It was during this period between Dutch colonisation and the Japanese invasion in 1942 that Spies and the other Bali artists and intellectuals basked in their ‘golden age’ of serene inspiration; a remarkable era for these bohemians indeed considering, as Geoffrey Robinson has recently proposed, that ‘[f]or most Balinese, Bali was no paradise’ in the 1920s and 1930s.72 More significantly, scholars now generally concur over the contention that the social and political instability among Balinese that characterised the period was in fact aggravated and, in some cases, created, by the Dutch administration.

Disaffection among Bali’s lower classes, for example, was provoked by colonial redefinitions of caste. Dutch bureaucrats, relying on pedanda (Brahman priests) and satria (upper caste) informants,73 legislated to codify caste distinctions, with the effect that once- fluid status definitions abruptly became uncomfortably rigid for some social groups. Before colonisation, far more sudra (commoners) had held positions of authority. Tensions resulted when respected non-aristocratic groups like the pande (smiths) lost their status as a result of the new regulations.74

Ordinary Balinese also suffered economically under colonial rule. Geoffrey Robinson has posited that Bali shouldered one of the highest tax burdens in the Netherlands Indies. Between 1917 and 1930 the colonial state extracted a surplus of 37 million guilders from Bali and Lombok alone, and in 1927 Bali generated almost two thirds of all land tax revenue collected from the Outer Islands.75 Robinson focuses perhaps overmuch on the magnitude and variety of taxes that Balinese were subject to in his analysis of economic

71 Vickers (1996): 7. 72 Robinson: 20. 73 Henk Schulte-Nordholt has also commented on the significance of Balinese informants in shaping western images of Bali. These informants became attuned to what westerners expected to learn and stood to benefit from providing the desired information: 8. 74 Robinson: 14, 30, 32. 63. Caste disputes were ‘endemic’ judging from the volume of cases that went through the Raad van Kerta (Court of Customary Law), Robinson points out, many of them being initiated by the educated sudra: 36. 75 Robinson: 56–7.

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conditions prior to the Great Depression.76 In the absence of detailed information on living standards (Robinson does not discuss average incomes or mortality rates in his study, for instance), a high tax burden alone cannot prove the severe hardship that Robinson proposes. His analysis of the effects of the Depression itself, on the other hand, is more convincing. Between 1930 and 1932, Balinese producers of livestock and agricultural products more than doubled their export output, to no avail: the total value of exports for the period declined in absolute terms.77

Social and political tensions notwithstanding, local resentments were rarely aimed at the Dutch because of their astute insistence on indirect rule.78 By throwing their support behind the traditional aristocracy, the colonists encouraged conflict between Balinese along class and caste lines, and between ruling houses, without becoming targets of discontent themselves.79 The colonists’ evasion of direct accountability for the growing tensions in Balinese society perhaps enabled the consistently idyllic themes that preoccupied European artists. The painters who lived on the island during the early 1930s remained curiously silent in their work on the widespread poverty, landlessness and dislocation that the Depression engendered among their neighbours.80 Spies continued to paint peaceful

76 Robinson: 56. 77 Robinson: 57. Robinson notes that the Dutch were forced to reduce the tax burden during the Depression. Fewer than 10% of tax payers could afford to pay the corvée exemption fee after 1932, and in 1933 more than 50% of land tax went unpaid. 78 Indirect rule was formalised in 1938, when the ruling families of all eight districts were formally reinstated as zelf-bestuurders (self-rulers). However, the eastern kingdoms of Bangli, Karangasem and Gianyar had been governed more or less indirectly from the outset, and after an initial period of recriminations for their resistance to Dutch rule, the remaining kingdoms gradually had their privileges restored — Robinson: 24–5, 29, 36. 79 Robinson: 14. 80 Robinson: 14, 53, 57–8. Robinson also argues that there was considerable hardship among ordinary Balinese in the period leading up to the Depression, which is a less convincing proposition. His evidence consists mainly of the high rates and broad range of taxes levied by the colonial state. As argued in the text, however, a heavy tax burden alone does not constitute proof of hardship in the absence of information on living standards, such as income and mortality rates. Robinson fails to provide information on these.

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landscapes and cheerful village views throughout the early 1930s. Adrien le Mayeur, the Belgian artist who had set up house on Sanur beach with a beautiful Balinese legong dancer named Ni Pollok, stoically continued throughout the 1930s to elaborate on his favourite painterly theme of voluptuous women frolicking amid luridly tinted tropical gardens. His efforts were only curtailed, it seems, by a lack of supplies: Le Mayeur persisted with his idyllic daydreams during the Pacific War, only in black and white (for an apparent want of paint). The numerous pencil drawings on grass matting that date from the early 1940s have been overlooked by most art historians, who have failed to note that the absence of colour alone — presumably a consequence of the decline in luxury imports to Bali — was the only noticeable impact of the war on Le Mayeur’s work.81

Painterly images of colonial Balinese villages as intact replicas of their primaeval antecedents represented perhaps the greatest deviation from reality. Contrary to the image that was propagated by painters like Spies, whose landscapes featured communities ostensibly untouched by Dutch colonial rule, Balinese villages were subject to radical changes of organisation during the first decades of the twentieth century. For the sake of administrative convenience, village boundaries on Bali were often modified and their

It is perhaps worth citing the recent work of Peter Boomgaard and Ian Brown and their colleagues on the Depression in Southeast Asia, which offers a cogent revisionist perspective of the slump. While the authors do not consider Bali, their research recommends new ways of measuring economic experiences. Boomgaard and Brown suggest that mortality rates ought to be taken into account — Peter Boomgaard and Ian Brown, ‘The economies of Southeast Asia in the 1930s Depression: An introduction’ in Peter Boomgaard and Ian Brown (eds), Weathering the Storm: The Economies of Southeast Asia in the 1930s Depression (Leiden, 2000): 9. In the same volume, Jeroen Touwen suggests that the smallholders of the Outer Islands adopted strategies to cope with the downturn that alleviated its adverse effects considerably. These strategies included reducing the production of export crops and diversifying food crops — Jeroen Touwen, ‘Entrepreneurial strategies in indigenous export agriculture in the Outer Islands of colonial Indonesia, 1925–38’ in Boomgaard and Brown: 165–6. 81 This is true for a small opus of works dated 1942 — based on my own observations made at the Museum Le Mayeur, Sanur (Bali), May 2005. To my knowledge, only two other scholars have even noted Le Mayeur’s lack of supplies during the war, and even then no mention was made of his curious adherence, under the circumstances, to idyllic themes — See Jop Ubbens and Cathinka Huizing, Adrien Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès, Painter-Traveller (Wijk and Aalburg, 1995): 143.

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memberships reconstituted. Banjar (associations of households that performed ritual or palace duties), which often consisted of households from various communities, became wards of single villages under Dutch rule. Further, in the interests of insuring that no community was too ungainly to administer or too minor to bother with, some subak (irrigation communities) were pared down while others were enlarged. Some Balinese consequently found themselves governed by new district heads in recently created or inflated subak.82

In the nineteenth century, colonists had similarly busied themselves with tailoring the structure of Javanese villages to suit administrative requirements. Here the Central Javanese desa came to represent the ideal rural community, consisting of dwellings situated within their own garden plot and surrounded by a hedge. Units were collectively enclosed by an outer border; then came arable fields, forests, commons, and wilderness. Such nucleated arrangements were by no means dominant throughout Java, especially in less populated regions.83 However, the administrative needs of the colonial state often directed the creation of centralised villages. Officials were particularly concerned with the practical matter of accounting for and controlling populations. Nineteenth century authorities simply combined Javanese villages that were deemed too negligible to be administered independently.84 The facilitation of surveillance and tax collection often followed in the wake of the cultivation system: rural communities that had once been scattered widely across fertile lands became concentrated in the centre of plantation districts wherever the system was implemented.85 Later in the nineteenth century, state initiatives to conserve marginal lands, like those of the over-exploited Tengger highlands, similarly resulted in new efforts to curtail the movement of people. Large areas of forest were closed off and villages amalgamated to aid the enforcement of new restrictions.86 Robert Cribb has observed that the net result of such adjustments was to create communities that were more

82 Vickers (1996):133–4. 83 Peter Boomgaard, Children of the Colonial State: Popoluation Growth and Economic Development in Java, 1795–1880 (Amsterdam,1989): 68. 84 Boomgaard (1989): 70. 85 Cribb (2000): 137. 86 Robert Hefner, The Political Economy of Mountain Java (Berkeley, 1990): 51.

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sedentary than their pre-colonial antecedents,87 which was probably what the Dutch had intended. Jeremy Kemp has noted that it was a common feature of colonial rule throughout Southeast Asia that villages were increasingly corporatised as communal and salary lands proliferated.88

Paintings by civil servants like Jacob Dirk van Herwerden (1806–78) expressed the nineteenth century colonial preference for centralised Javanese communities with a suitably antique appearance. Van Herwerden worked as an administrator on Java in the first half of the nineteenth century, but only began painting after 1851, upon his return to the Netherlands, where he improved his skills under the tutelage of a Belgian landscape specialist named François Roffiaen. Like Abraham Salm, Van Herwerden liked to depict his landscapes in a panoramic style, from a distant but stable vantage point. His paintings were intended to capture the topographical realities of Javanese landscapes; indeed, in keeping with the mapping impulse in Dutch colonial art, Van Herwerden single-handedly charted several regions of East Java during his residence there.89 The colonial fetish for communities ostensibly undisturbed by European rule is also reflected in his paintings. His villages appear quiet, rustic, unconscious of their integration into the colonial system of surveillance and extraction and hence, by default, consensual to the imposition of Dutch rule. At the same time, it was important that the ideal Javanese village should demonstrate no visible capability of posing a threat to the colonial order should the state suddenly make its presence better known. Paintings like Tenggereesch Dorp bij Wonokitri (Village near Wonokitri, Tengger region) [Plate 8] emphasised ramshackle huts built from bamboo and thatched with palm, connected together by earthen roads and frail wooden bridges. These structures delineated the space as being settled but flimsily pre-modern, quaint and no threat to colonial authority.

Such were the kinds of village landscapes that Dutch bureaucrats in the late colonial period

87 Cribb (2000): 113. 88 Jeremy Kemp, Seductive Mirage: The Search for the Village Community in Southeast Asia (Dordrecht, 1988): 28. 89 Scalliet (1999): 78–80.

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were trained to recognise. The notion that the ‘traditional’ Indies village was an organic entity linked umbilically to the natural and historical landscape was instilled in official minds through education programs. Until 1900 the civil service academy in Delft used model replicas of ‘traditional’ villages to instruct its recruits before sending them off to govern the colonies.90 Here, and at international colonial exhibitions,91 Dutch elites peddled the concept of the Indies village in its antique form. When Europeans did not discover their ideal in evidence they frequently assumed that the traditional village was in decline rather than doubt its very existence. Thus in 1884, a children’s book author named Nellie van Kol wrote regretfully that there were no ‘real’ villages left in Java anymore except for Buitenzorg,92 that most hyper-idealised and constructed of all colonial outposts in the Indies.93 Where adjustments to community structures were acknowledged by the Dutch, these were justified in terms of restoring the village to its central place in indigenous landscapes.94

On Bali, Dutch authorities worked not only to maintain the mythology that the village landscape had survived the imposition of colonial rule intact, but also to propogate the

90 JLW van Leur and RPJ Ammerlaan, De Indische Instelling te Delft (Delft, 1989): 78, 91, 93. The Indies Institute was operational between 1864 and 1900. Its collection is now part of the Museum Nusantara in Delft. Interestingly, the National Museum of Indonesia also maintains an exhibition of representative houses from throughout the archipelago. 91 Maria Grever, ‘Reconstructing the fatherland: Comparative perspectives on women and 19th century exhibitions’ in Maria Grever and Fia Dienteren (eds), A Fatherland for Women (Amsterdam, 2000): 17. Grever notes that the Dutch staged a Javanese kampung at the 1889 Paris Exhibition, and attempted to repeat this display in 1900 — to no avail: no Javanese were willing to participate. Some of the collection of the Academy in Delft derived from colonial exhibitions — Van Leur and Ammerlaan: 89. 92 Rudolph Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton and Oxford, 2002): 53. 93 See, for example, Zandvliet (2002b): 283. Incidentally, Zandvliet notes that the area around present-day Bogor was considered wasteland by the Dutch before the botanical garden was constructed. 94 Vickers points out that there were some critical observers of colonial policy who openly conceded that the Dutch were altering rather than preserving Balinese forms of life. Vickers makes particular mention of Victor Emmanuel Korn (1892–1969), a scholar of traditional law, who argued that in ‘rationalising’ Balinese society for ‘bureaucratic convenience’ the colonial state was implementing changes, in some cases radical discontinuities with the pre-colonial past — (1996): 94.

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notion that the Indies village ought to be preserved in its ‘traditional’ state, largely because the island’s culture was deemed too fragile to withstand modern foreign influences. By ‘foreign’, the Dutch wardens of rust en orde did not mean ‘European’ so much as Javanese. The program of Baliseering (Balinisation) that commenced in the 1920s was largely an effort to insulate Bali from emerging communist and nationalist movements on Java.95 The wider colonial community, however, tended to believe that even western influence, if allowed to permeate Bali without regulation, would ultimately have a deleterious impact on the island. The concept of Bali as a living museum in European historiography had its genesis in the ideas, once again, of Raffles, who saw Balinese culture as a derivative of ancient Javanese traditions. Vickers has shown how Raffles became convinced that Javanese culture, meanwhile, had declined and that its legacy on Bali remained arrested at the point where the Javanese transfer had taken place.96 The idea that Bali had no ‘history’ (following nineteenth century European logic — that is, a linear, progressive development toward an ever more sophisticated civilisation)97 was widespread among western observers.

This was certainly a view that prevailed among the majority of artists who lived and worked on Bali in the 1920s and 1930s. Even the most progressive among them adopted the paternalistic view that European and Balinese arts were mutually exclusive, and that the latter could not survive an equal exchange with the supposedly more robust European tradition. Spies, Bonnet, Poortenaar, Nieuwenkamp, Paulides, and Ouborg, not to mention the administrative and academic establishments, all voiced their conviction that a European presence on Bali would corrode the ‘pristine’ culture of its inhabitants.98 For this reason, colonial artists were reluctanct to share their techniques unreservedly with Balinese painters. Neither Rudolph Bonnet nor Walter Spies, for instance, were inclined to allow Balinese artists to copy their work, on the assumption that the latter would abandon their

95 Robinson: 14, 36. 96 Vickers (1996): 23. 97 Vickers cites Gregory Bateson as a well-known twentieth century proponent of this view that Bali had ‘no history’ — (1996): 123. 98 Leonie ten Duis and Annelies Haase, Ouburg: Schilder (Amsterdam, 1990): 17; Spruit (1992): 20–1; Spruit (1997): 18; Hammann: 11; Koos van Brakel, ‘Introduction’ in Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeanette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics (Amsterdam, 1999): 131.

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own traditions in favour of western methods.99 The Europeans on Bali, it seems, believed themselves to possess the moral discipline to study Indonesian art forms100 while remaining faithful to western modes of execution. Even in their sympathy for Balinese culture and landscapes, therefore, western artists assumed a monopoly on the power of judgment, taking for granted that only ‘insiders’ of European culture could ascertain its value and transmit it to ‘outsiders’, who were certain to be enthralled by the grand façade of western civilisation.

In keeping with what scholars of colonial Indonesia have already determined with respect to official culture,101 the art produced by painters such as Walter Spies on Bali and JD van Herwerden on Java expressed the general tendency among European colonists to depoliticise Indies landscapes. Instead of depicting villages as sites of recently imposed colonial order, European artists historicised Balinese and Javanese communities to fit a practical ideal: landscapes that appeared as contented extensions of their ancient forebears augured well for the future stability of the colonial state for they conferred, by default, legitimacy upon the instruments of Dutch rule. Images of new landscapes, or of local discontent with colonial restructuring of the village, had no place in the bucolic fantasies of the Bali artists in particular. By contrast, the work of indigenous Balinese artists from the 1920s and 1930s often communicated a renewed interest in the potency of witches and demons, images which (as Vickers has suggested) indicated a latent anxiety among some Balinese at the growing social and political rifts within their landscapes.102

99 Spruit (1992): 20–1. 100 Rudolph Bonnet’s experiments in the wayang style of Balinese art can be viewed at the Museum Puri Lukisan in Ubud — for example, Pura Tjampuhan (1941). The museum also houses paintings in the wayang style gifted to Bonnet by Balinese friends, including I Gusti Dokar (1911–36) and I Made Geriya (1898- 1934). Walter Spies was also a collector of Balinese art — Ten Kate: 133. 101 See, for example, Schulte-Nordholt: 3, who contends that Europeans in Southeast Asia generally preferred to conceive of the village and state as separate institutions. 102 Vickers (1996): 146, 212.

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F Working the land G

Since the occupation of most Europeans in the Indies referred in some form or another to agriculture, the image of workers in the field became perhaps one of the strongest associations that Dutch observers made between landscape and colonisation. The nimble- fingered female tea picker, the peasant boy atop his buffalo, and the generic figure of the farmer bent over his or her rice fields were among the most pervasive icons of indigenous working landscapes produced by Europeans. These sorts of images purveyed a traditional way of life typified by a certain rustic charm that particularly appealed (once again) to colonial painters. However, as demonstrated by the efforts of the VOC in the seventeenth century to geographically limit the cultivation of spices, as well as the twentieth century exploits of private planters bent on large-scale commercial agriculture, the Dutch had often been responsible for introducing radical changes to Indies landscapes and the lives of the people who worked within them, often with turbulent consequences. Indeed, contemporary scholarship suggests that, throughout the colonial period, one of the most volatile sites in the Netherlands Indies was the agrarian landscape.

In keeping with the tendency to idealise their subjects, Indies painters were not at all inclined to depict the dark underside of the agricultural economy. By contrast photographers, with their characteristically documentary style, could hardly avoid the topic of unrest in working landscapes, even if their perspectives often emphasised the image of a beleaguered but vigorous ‘plantocracy’ reinforcing order in circumstances of adversity. The indentured Chinese and Javanese labourers who worked the plantation regions of East Sumatra gained particular infamy among colonists for their recalcitrance in succumbing to the strictures of a highly regulated physical and social environment. The critical indictments of Madelon Lulofs, whose 1930s exposés of plantation life mortified her more conservative compatriots,103 provide a striking contrast to the dulcet images of working landscapes that were more popular in colonial circles.

103 Rob Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies: A History of Dutch Colonial Literature (Amherst, 1982): 171; Anthony Reid, ‘Introduction’ to Madelon Lulofs, Coolie (Oxford, 1993) [First published 1932]: vi.

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The colonial idealisation of the Indies ‘peasant’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was no doubt related in part to a sudden nostalgia in the recently industrialised Netherlands, particularly after the ravages of the First World War, for a simpler rural past.104 The humble peasant in communion with his105 natural surroundings became the icon of the Indies at the hands of European painters. Many artists featured a variant of ‘the’ peasant — usually a symbolic abstraction intended to represent all peasants — in their work, frequently in the form of a bronzed young man, rather thin but strong-looking, barefoot and naked to the waist, plodding along a path or wading through a field, accompanied by his buffalo and carrying a load across his shoulders. Possibly the best- known image of the late colonial period in this genre was Java by Hendrik Paulides (1892-1967) [Plate 10]. Paulides was based in the Netherlands and had no family connections in the Indies. Drawn by the allure of the East, however, Paulides followed the swarm of Dutch artists to the Indies in the 1920s, visiting Java in 1922–4 followed by Bali in 1929–30.106 These two journeys were to furnish Paulides with a lifetime’s worth of subject matter, including Java. Completed in 1924, the image suggested in its very title that the peasant, who forms the centrepiece of the painting, was Java. It showed a sinuous young man in profile with bare feet107 and naked chest carrying a load of tropical fruits and other produce, with a sarung wrapped around his waist and his face shaded by a conical hat, moving through an abstract landscape that had been reduced to basic geometric elements: fields laid upon the earth like brickwork, triangular mountains, palm trees that had been amalgamated into a single mass of foliage, and a puff of cloud — the barest references necessary to signify the quintessentially tropical. Perhaps unintentionally (although coincidence is by no means the only explanation), Java bears a remarkable resemblance to a striking photograph of a fisherman in Banyuwangi, East Java, attributed to

104 Victor R Savage, Western Impressions of Nature and Landscape in Southeast Asia (Singapore, 1984): 22-3. 105 Most painterly images featured men. 106 Hammann: 8–9, 61. 107 At his feet are two female figures who supposedly symbolise Javanese dance and music — Hammann: 55.

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the studio of O Kurkdjian & Co in Surabaya.108 It is possible that Paulides saw and was inspired by the image; it was certainly he who popularised it. Indeed, Java found favour among the art establishment in the Netherlands. It won Paulides a prize and was henceforth regarded as being among his best work.109 It was during this period that Paulides’ career began to accelerate. His specialisation in murals and large paintings proved to be a format that suited the colonial and world exhibitions, to which Paulides became a regular contributor throughout the 1930s.110 He also succeeded in attracting official patronage from prestigious sources, like Governor-General de Graeff (whose portrait he painted in 1930), as well as the Colonial Institute and the Ministry of Finance. The latter commissioned six wall maps from Paulides for the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden during the 1930s.111 Perhaps in a bid to make the most of his success, the Java figure appeared repeatedly in unaltered form throughout Paulides’ art,112 even though he was clearly capable of more nuanced renditions of peasant life and work.113

The most conspicuous abstractions of the Indies peasant are to be found in Walter Spies’ paintings, where the male Balinese ‘type’ was frequently employed to convey Spies’

108 The photograph is shown in Toekang Portret: 100 Years of Photography in the Dutch East Indies 1839-1939 (Amsterdam, 1989): plate 120, p 143. The photograph was produced between 1904 and 1935 (see p 184) — that is, after the death of the famous Armenian photographer Kurkdjian in 1903 (which is not to say that it wasn’t one of his photographs). Kurkdjian had established a studio in Surabaya in the 1880s — see Rob Nieuwenhuys, Baren en Oudgasten (Amsterdam, 1998): 12. 109 Hammann: 39. 110 Paulides entered works into the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, the 1937 World Exhibition and the 1939 World Fair — Hammann: 73, 83, 87. 111 Several murals were produced for the Colonial Institute/Tropenmusuem, not all of which are extant. However, the triptych that currently graces the entrance hall of Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum was painted by Paulides. These sorts of commissions continued into the 1950s, interrupted only by World War Two — Hammann: 61, 77, 86, 85, 110–11. 112 See Indonesiër (Indonesian), also painted in 1924, which shows the Java-figure steering a prau (a kind of baot) through choppy waters, and Het Oosten (The East) (undated), part of a triptych that was intended for a mural, which shows the Java-figure exiting on the right — in Hammann: 49. (Note the unusual and precocious choice of title for this painting — ‘Indonesia’ was not yet a word widely in use in 1924). 113 See Javaansche Sawah (Javanese Sawah) (1927) — in Hammann: 40.

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preoccupation with the historical continuity of Balinese landscapes. With few exceptions,114 Spies’ figures, sometimes simply duplicated within the same painting,115 stood for all peasants rather than for individuals, and for all times instead of a particular historical moment. By contrast, images of peasants in Balinese art were typically richly detailed, even if artists were careful to preserve the inferiority of the lower castes.116 Spies also tended to greatly attenuate the work that his peasant figures engaged in, subordinating their labour to the splendour of the tropical landscape for the pleasure of his viewers. Spies’ Balinese peasants usually appeared posing and resting, perhaps in imitation of the tranquility of Balinese landscapes.117

Spies was not the only artist to emphasise the ‘picturesque’ nature of agricultural work118 and to promote the view that ordinary Indies ‘natives’ still lived in harmony with nature. Paulides wrote in 1940 that ‘[t]hese handsomely built, artistically gifted people create through their art a visible world from everything that moves them inwardly and outwardly, which is perfectly in tune with the luxuriant tropical nature that they live amongst’.119 The prolific writer and artist Jan Poortenaar, who had also passed through the Indies in the

114 Notably, one of his early works, Heimkehrende Javaner (Javanese Returning Home) (1924), which shows some figures as individuals with distinct features — although the first and last figures in the row, even here, look remarkably similar to one another. 115 See Landscape in Spruit (1997): 71, and Desadurchblik (View Through a Village) and Wasserlandschaft (Water Landscape) in Rhodius and Darling: 38 and 30, respectively. See also Het Landschaft en zijn Kinderen (The Landscape and its Children) in J Terwen-de Loos, Nederlandse Schilders en Tekenaars in de Oost, 17de–20ste Eeuw (Amsterdam, 1972): 129. 116 Vickers: 107, who has also noted that in western images of Bali the peasant often appeared as ‘an idealised figure with no real identity’: 6. 117 Sawahs im Preangergebirgte (Sawahs in the Priangan Ranges) (1923) and Sawah Landschaft mit Gunung Agung (Sawah Landscape with Mt Agung) (1937), in Rhodius and Darling: 41; and Ploughing Peasant (1932) in Van Brakel: 114. 118 Joyce van Fenema, ‘Introduction’ in Peter EM Hamman, Hendrik Paulides: Painter and Narrator (Singapore, 1997): 5. 119 Hendrik Paulides, ‘Oude en nieuwe kunst op Bali, tegen den achtergrond van het Westen’, Cultureel Indië, 12, 1940: 176. The original reads: ‘Deze fraai gebouwde, artistiek begaafde mensen, schiepen zich door hun kunst een zichtbare wereld van alles wat hun innerlijk en uiterlijk beroerde, die volmaakt afgestemd op de weelderige tropennatuur te midden waarvan zij leven.’

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1920s, deemed that ‘[t]he Oriental knows how to live in harmony with his universe’.120 In Java, Poortenaar opined that the western craze for all things modern ‘is at the farthest remove from the attitude to life of the Javanese native. He lives in much closer contact with nature, and his emotions vibrate in subtle harmony with it.’121

Such romantic views reinforced the colonial assumption that agricultural work could not possibly constitute a burden upon the Indies peasant. Jan Poortenaar, like Walter Spies, was inclined toward minimising the work of peasants in his art, painting scenes of workers trawling slowly through rice paddies, gathering beneath a shady tree to sort husks, or simply dwarfed into obscurity by the monumental landscapes around them.122 Indeed, the diminutive figure glimpsed from afar was a favourite device of colonial painters. Broad vistas where individual toil was shrouded by remoteness and hazy light were Leo Eland’s favoured modes for depicting agricultural work in the nineteenth century.123 When visible, peasants’ work frequently appeared laconic: viewers saw no muscles straining, nor were they shown sweat beading on sun-scorched limbs. Abraham Salm’s oddly pastoral views of tobacco-growing regions — all the more astonishing in that they were painted by a professional planter — similarly utilised distance to erase the symptoms of effort in peasant work.

Realist sensibilities eventually began to pervade Indies art in the late nineteenth century, and with this trend came a tendency among some colonial painters to depict scenes from everyday life with greater exactness. Willem Bleckman (1853–1942), whom Marie-Odette Scalliet has hailed as ‘Java’s first modern painter’,124 was one of these artists. Bleckman

120 Jan Poortenaar, An Artist in Java and Other Islands of Indonesia (Oxford, 1990) [First published 1928]: 26. 121 Poortenaar: 41. 122 See Rice Fields, Rice Fields with Buffalo, and — Poortenaar: 6, 32, 106. 123 See, for example, Eland’s Paddy in Priangan in Van Brakel: 114. See also an untitled painting in the Museum Nusantara collection of women bent over a sawah during a sunset [S 451-1630] — a rather distant and romantic view of the rice planting that glosses over the fact that these women were working until sundown. 124 Scalliet (1999): 86.

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did not begin painting in the impressionistic style that he became renowned for until the1880s, after becoming exposed to the works of the Hague School on a sojourn to the Netherlands (indeed, his son-in-law was descended from one of the founders of the movement).125 His undated Ominous Weather [Plate 9] shows, at unusually close range, four male labourers rushing to bring in the rice harvest before a downpour. Bleckman’s painting deftly captures the darkening clouds and sallow light that often precede a storm: one can almost smell the deluge approaching. Perhaps the greater distinction of the piece, however, is that it represents one of the few well-known Indies paintings to depict the laboriousness of agricultural work.126

The European predilection to depict the subsistence sectors of the Netherlands Indies economy over and above modern agricultural and industrial developments is nonetheless preserved in Bleckman’s painting, and was shared by other artists. In fact, were a contemporary viewer to rely entirely on European paintings as a source of insight into the nature of working environments in the Indies, he or she might be forgiven for concluding that colonialism had little impact on the appearance or use of agricultural landscapes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Het Oosten (The East), part of a mural that Hendrik Paulides designed for the Colonial Institute,127 agricultural work and prosperity were signified by a series of ‘traditional’ figures — women pounding rice and making batik, a peasant and his buffalo, even the artist’s prize-winning Java figure has wandered into the picture (again). The landscape surrounding these figures contains nothing of the large-scale or commercial — an extraordinary and misleading oversight, given that Java was the locus of increasingly advanced technologies that were associated with the cultivation and processing of agricultural products. This is not to say that natural landscapes no longer existed in the Indies of the early twentieth century: on the contrary, much of the archipelago remained rural, or forested.128 However, with notable exceptions like The Kedawong Sugar

125 Scalliet (1999): 84, 86. 126 Another more realistic depiction of agricultural labour worth mentioning is E Nijland’s Een rijstveld (A Rice Field) (1897), which shows men, women and children bent over the paddy at planting time, with careful attention given to the tools that were used — Bastin and Brommer: 283. 127 The mural, incidentally, never came to fruition — Hamman: 49. 128 In 1940, 66% of the archipelago was still covered by forest — Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 194.

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Factory near Pasuruan (East Java) by Hermanus Theodorus Hesselaar, and an earlier lithograph by WJ Gordon after AJ Bik, La Fabrique de Sucre, Située dans le Domaine le Serpon (Sugar Factory, Situated on the Estate of Serpon), colonial painters were rarely inclined to depict the modern landscapes of the Indies.

Colonial photographers differed with painters on this point. Their documentary impulses were given plenty of scope for indulgence by the highly regulated character of commercial plantations, where landscapes and tasks alike were divided into categories according to the dictates of industrial rationalisation. In order to divulge the provenance of tropical consumer goods (rather than the staples of local subsistence that interested painters), photographers by necessity had to enter the factories and plantations that their brush- wielding fellows preferred to avoid. The benign instruction of European audiences was one result of such ventures. Nineteenth and twentieth century photographers gratified the curiosity of western viewers who wished to learn where the coffee and tea they sipped was cultivated, how the sugar they stirred into their beverage was processed, and what the tobacco wrappers that encased their cigars looked like in the field. The studio of Woodbury and Page produced images for the tourist market of nutmeg-pickers at work in the Banda islands, labourers stripping bark from cinchona trees on Java, and men sorting coffee beans on a West Sumatran estate [Plate 11].129 Boomgaard and Van Dijk’s recent Het Indië Boek contains similar pictures by unknown photographers who ventured into tea and tobacco sorting sheds,130 onto rubber plantations to document the tapping procedure131 and into the factories where latex was processed.132 Here photographers captured images of sorting, drying, and processing sheds stuffed with heavy machinery,133 and modern tools like the motorised tractors that were used to plough sugar fields.134 Indeed, those landscapes

129 Steve Wachlin, Woodbury & Page, Photographers: Java (Leiden, 1994): 138, 91, 177 respectively, all from the nineteenth century. 130 Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 158–9, 313 — On Java and Sumatra respectively. 131 Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 127. 132 Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 318. 133 Boomgaard and Van Dijk — A cassava mill in Java, c 1920. Much of its products were intended for the European market: 111; A rubber factory in Deli, East Sumatra, c 1925: 318. 134 Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 166 — In Malang, East Java, c 1935.

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associated with cultivars for the export industry on Java and Sumatra were among the most industrialised in the Indies. This was particularly true for the sugar industry on Java which, until the onset of the Depression, utilised the latest available technologies and was among the largest and most advanced of its kind in the world.135

Increases in mechanisation aside, large-scale agricultural concerns remained landscapes filled with people, even as late as the early twentieth century. Colonial photographers seemed to delight in taking group portraits of plantation workforces gathered en masse to demonstrate the impressiveness of the company that employed them.136 A perusal of such assemblies yields mostly Asian faces that vastly outnumber a smattering of European overseers. Photographers who followed labourers to the site of their occupations took instructive pictures of people in still poses that were designed to facilitate the demonstration of their particular task, like rubber tapping and tea picking, occupations that women were often engaged in.137 Indeed, the specialisation of agricultural occupations in the late colonial period was such a pronounced feature of work on commercial estates that Boomgaard has described these landscapes as fabrieken in het veld (factories in the field).138 Even subsistence activities like rice farming were shown by photographers to be far more organised and labour-intensive undertakings than painters were wont to reveal.139

135 Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 155. 136 See, for example, Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 312 — in , , c 1893. 137 A good example of a demonstrative pose occurs in a photo of a female rubber tapper — Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 127. On Java, 45% of the labour force on tea and coffee estates was female in 1930. A third of Java’s working population was female, 40% of them in agriculture — Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘Colonial ambivalencies: European attitudes towards the Javanese household (1900–1942)’ in Juliette Koning, Marleen Nolten, Janet Rodenburg and Ratna Saptari (eds), Women and Households in Indonesia: Cultural Notions and Social Patterns (Richmond, 2000): 35. The greatest concentration of women in the workforce was on Java and Madura, where many were involved in light industry. This was not so common in the Outer Islands — Siddharth Chandra, ‘The role of female industrial labour in the late colonial Netherlands Indies’, Indonesia, 74, 2002: 113–14, 126. 138 Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 312. 139 Boomgaard and Van Dijk: 108–9 — two anonymous photographs showing an army of labourers, many of them women, in Java around 1915 and 1918 respectively.

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Apart from its instructive uses, the camera also became an extension of colonial surveillance mechanisms. This was particularly true within the highly regulated landscapes of the plantation. Triumphant images of half-naked labourers toiling under the watchful eyes of several tiers of supervisors, both European and Asian, mimicked the prerogatives of planters who were concerned to demonstrate and maintain the calm and orderliness of the landscapes (and workers) under their direction.140 No doubt the tone of these photographs was influenced by their patronage: many of them were commissioned by the plantation firms themselves for company albums141 rather than for the wider market that images of tea-pickers and bean-sorters were intended for. This was even more so the case for photographs that suggested rust en orde did not reign in perpetuity on plantations, and that labourers did not always take to the carefully constructed landscapes that they found themselves toiling in. The forest that bordered Sumatran plantations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was clearly perceived by Asian workers as a landscape beyond colonial authority, for desertion was a common infraction142 and the jungle was a common destination for absconders. In his Taming the Coolie Beast, Jan Breman included photographs of Batak men who were hired by companies to ‘hunt’ for escaped coolies143 and return them to the orderly strictures of the plantation.

Planters clearly shared the belief that the forest at the borders of their estates evaded colonial control, for fences were sometimes erected around estates to protect against raids from hostile local populations and wild animals.144 Order was maintained strictly within the boundaries of the plantation, where the systematic landscape became a metaphor for the regulation of life and work. Punishments like floggings and even executions were exacted

140 See Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial State in Southeast Asia (Delhi, 1990): plate 11, showing rows of young tobacco plants being tended by coolies with Asian and European supervisors nearby, who are distinguished from the manual workers by their costume and posture. 141 Breman (1990): vvii. 142 Breman, while unable to provide any figures on this offence, suggested that around 1900 it was the most common breach of contract committed by coolies in East Sumatra — Breman (1990): 159. 143 Breman (1990): plate 36. 144 Breman (1990): plate 6. Plate 9A — photograph of armed guards attached to pay officers who might be attacked by run-away coolies hiding in the jungle; Plate 39 — The plantation police force.

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against coolies who refused to submit to their standardised surrounds within the grounds of the plantation, so that social control would be explicitly associated with the regulated environment in the minds of all employees.145 Just as monocultures were enforced in the fields, so behaviours that erred from the expectations of colonial overseers were weeded out.

Like weeds, however, disorder within the working landscapes of the plantation seemed impossible to entirely eradicate. This was certainly the impression given by the work of novelists like Madelon Lulofs, who wrote about her experience of Sumatra in the first decades of the twentieth century in Rubber (1931) and Coolie (1932), among other works.146 In her novels Lulofs explored the responses of both European and Asian workers to plantation environments. She described not only the exhausted bodies and ragged emotions of plantation workers,147 but also detailed the oppressive landscapes — the hyper- regulation of the estate juxtaposed against the impenetrable chaos of the jungle — that compounded the misery of planter life. For the European characters in Rubber, the Sumatran plantation was regarded as an oasis of order within a vast, wild frontier — an attitude commensurate with the colonists’ broader view of themselves as a community of innocent expatriates marooned within a hostile Asian environment. The ugliness of transitional landscapes (such as those created by razing forest to make way for cultivation) galled Lulofs’ European characters,148 as did (paradoxically) the persistence of forest at the

145 Breman (1990): see the two photographs on the title page of Taming the Coolie Beast. 146 Lulofs’ other works on plantation life include De Andere Wereld (The Other World) and Emigranten (Emigrants) (both published 1933). 147 ‘On this dismal, inhospitable, repulsive land the coolies were setting out sticks to mark the places where the young rubber trees were to be planted. Hundreds of brown, half-naked bodies bent over the brown earth for ten hours a day in the same regular, monotonous labour. Their backs were shiny, wet with sweat. Their broad, naked feet sank into the loose earth.’ — Madelon Lulofs, Rubber (Amsterdam, 1933): 7. 148 ‘It was a colourless, dead plain where everything that had once been alive had been uprooted, burnt away, annihilated: the stately trees of the old forest, the thorny rattan, the sneaking, stifling weeds, the ferns and the mosses, the snow-white and dark purple orchids that had released their perfume in concealment. There had been animals too — snakes, scorpions, ants, and centipedes. For ages they had lived their crawling existence on the forest floor, where they had crept, wriggled, rooted and reproduced themselves in the damp, dim layer of decaying, brewing rot of leaf and bark detritus … ’ (Eén kleurlooze, doode vlakte, waar ál wat er eens

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borders of plantations. Planters rejoiced, according to Lulofs, in the orderly cultivation that proceeded from the ashes of the antagonistic jungle. Clinical rows of tobacco or rubber plants, tidy roadways, neat houses and barracks with manicured lawns and gardens — these were the signs of a regulated working landscape that would safely support European enterprise.

In Coolie Lulofs attempted, sometimes persuasively, to imagine how the plantation landscape appeared to the Javanese labourers who comprised the majority of workers on rubber and tobacco plantations by the early twentieth century.149 Ruki, her protagonist, quickly learns to associate the loss of his liberty as an indentured labourer — particularly his inability to leave the plantation, let alone return to Java — with the space that holds him captive, the rubber estate itself. His response to the plantation landscape at all stages of its development is one of revulsion. It is ever associated with slavish work, constant surveillance, and arbitrary brutality. Despite his intitial fear of the jungle, which is shared with his European supervisors, Ruki’s alienation from the plantation landscape ultimately leads him into the forest where he seeks respite from the controlled monotony of the estate. ‘Now they had to eat’, Ruki reflects during his absence. ‘And now they had to go home. Presently, at nine o’clock, they would have to go to sleep … Had to, always had to … No, he was never going to return. He was happier in the forest, though he scratched his skin on the rattan, though the mosquitoes and the ants feasted on his body … He was free … Free, geleefd had, was uitgeroeid, weggebrand, vernietigd: de statige boomen van het oude woud, de doornige rottan, de sluipende, verstikkende woekerplanten, de varens en de mossen, de sneeuwblanke en donkerpaarse orchideën, die daar heel in het verborgen hadden geurd. En ál het gedierte ook: slangen, schorpeioenen, mieren, duizendpooten … Eeuwen lang hadden zij daar op dien woudbodem hun krioelend bestaan gehad, kronkelend, kruipend, wroetend en zich voortplantend in die vochtige, duistere laag van schimmelende, broeiende rotting der blâren- en houtresten …) — Madelon Lulofs, Koelie (Amsterdam, 1932): 63-4. 149 Lulofs mentions Chinese coolies throughout the novel, as well as the ethnic tensions between Chinese and Javanese on the plantations, but she does not attempt to venture into the social and psychological world of the Chinese to the extent that she does with some of her Javanese characters. In 1930, Javanese made up nearly 50% of the Asian population of East Sumatra, the largest single ethnic group of a total population of 1.5 million. Further, in 1930, 30% of Deli’s population were plantation workers — Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (Ann Arbor, 1995). Breman found that in 1900 there were still almost 7000 Chinese coolies in Deli — Breman (1990): 57.

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as he had been free all his life on Java.’150 The reprieve is shortlived, however, for Ruki is captured and returned to the plantation, where he remains for the rest of his life.

In both novels, discipline was only tenuously imposed on Sumatran working landscapes. The punishments that photographers occasionally captured in their images of plantation life were insufficient deterrents against the violent outbursts that threatened to undermine the peace. Though critical of the brutal treatment that coolies were subject to, Lulofs nonetheless attributed disorder on plantations to the behaviour of the coolies themselves, whom she portrayed as prone to running amok151 and, more significantly, as nursing an irrepressible aversion to hard work and self-improvement. Just as the plantation was constantly vulnerable to the feral jungle in Lulofs’ novels, so the Asian coolie threatened always to revert to his (or her) wilder self.152 In Lulofs’ eyes, it was this apparent inability of Asian workers to view the frontier as an opportunity that distinguished coolies from their European overseers and accounted for their hostility toward Sumatran landscapes. The fact that colonists freely chose the plantation as a worksite and stood to enrich themselves from the plantation — instead of having their liberties constrained by indenturement and low wages as coolies did — seems not to have informed Lulofs’ otherwise insightful differentiation between European and Asian images of plantation landscapes.

150 ‘Nu moeten ze schaften … wist Ruki … Nu moeten ze naar huis. Straks, om negen uur moeten ze slapen gaan …. Moeten, altijd moeten … Nee, hij ging niet meer terug. Hij was gelukkiger in het bosch, al schramde hij zijn huid open aan de rottan, al vraten muskieten en mieren aan zijn lichaam … Hij was vrij … Vrij, zoals hij zijn heele leven op Java vrij was geweest.’ — Lulofs, Koelie (1932): 148. 151 See, for example, Lulof’s portrayal of a coolie who murders a Dutch assistant in Rubber. Immediately afterwards the perpetrator appears unaffected: ‘… indifferent, cool, almost unconscious … The primitive person, the suddenly unreasonable, illogical, unbridled, was awoken in all his heated passion, and was suddenly asleep again.’ ( … onverschillig, bekoeld … haast ónbeseffend … De oermensch, die plotseling onberedeneerd, onlogisch, onbeteugeld, in al zijn heete driften was ontwaakt, was weer even plotseling ingeslapen.) — (1932): 187. 152 Lulofs portrayed female coolies to be just as irrational and violent as their male counterparts. On the unlikely association in Lulofs’ work between ‘the’ Javanese character and the Sumatran jungle, see Coolie (1993): 49–50.

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F G

The ideal of tranquility in Indies landscape preoccupied many colonial artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but particularly painters, who revealed the insecure bases of Dutch territorial power through the structural incorporation of its principle tools — surveillance and navigation — in the perspective of panoramic art works. Painterly representations of Indies landscapes typically proffered liberal doses of antiquity, reinforced by the invisibility of colonists themselves. As a consequence, painted views of Indies landscapes often appeared depoliticised and historically indeterminate, purged of every detail save for their topography, exoticism and rustic docility. Painters persisted in this blissfully static image of the Indies in the most unlikely circumstances — indeed, in contradiction to contemporary realities such as violence and war, and increasing colonial penetration of village and working landscapes.

Photographers and writers seemed to find the fiction of perpetual peace and colonial non- interference in Indies landscapes more difficult to maintain. This was particularly true on the frontiers of the expanding colonial state, in locations like the East Sumatran plantation belt. Here, even as their work celebrated the ostensible success of Dutch colonists in maintaining order within working landscapes, photographers (perhaps inadvertently) departed from the dominant mythology of benevolent colonial rule: control supplanted peace as the dominant status quo in photographic landscapes, just as industry (with its connotations of vigour and modernity) replaced prosperity (a more benign concept in the hands of painters) in these views.

The failure of colonial benevolence was, of course, implied in the images of order violently imposed that became the subject of some photographs of Sumatran working landscapes, notably those that were not intended for wider public consumption. Such photographic images, together with the observations of writers who had experienced the ‘frontier’, showed peace maintained with an iron fist in order to protect colonists from indigenous responses to intrusions in and changes to landscapes. The appearance of antiquity was impossible to preserve in this context. Indeed, as was demonstrated in the previous chapter,

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colonists saw the Sumatran wilderness as a place where culture had barely penetrated the tangle of nature, and therefore as an historically vacant landscape to begin with. Peace was — by necessity, in colonial minds — deferred to the future in representations of Sumatran worksites. This perhaps explains the absence of painters from these landscapes. As arch- idealists and historicisers, painters had not developed the vocabulary with which to express the turbulence and transformation that accompanied the progress of colonisation in the Indies.

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F Chapter 5 G

Sacred Landscapes1

Europeans arriving in the Netherlands Indies from the early nineteenth century would have noted that some parts of the archipelago — notably, the eastern islands that had been subject to early European settlement — had been Christianised.2 Most colonists, however, were more likely to pass through landscapes that were marked by Islamic places of worship

1 I will be discussing only Islamic and Hindu/Buddhist landscapes in this chapter, but there are certainly intriguing prospects for future research into the representation of Christian landscapes in the Netherlands Indies. 2 Places like Ambon, which had been exposed to Portuguese and Dutch traders since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had a history of early Christianisation. By the early 1930s, there were 1.7 million Christians in the Indies, around 3% of the total population. Indigenous Christians were far more numerous than European Christians — Geert Arend van Klinken, Minorities, Modernity and the Emerging Nation: Christians in Indonesia, a Biographical Approach (Leiden, 2003): 7, 10. The Dutch colonial state did not encourage active mission work until the second half of the nineteenth century — Robert Cribb, Historical Atlas of Indonesia (Surrey, 2000): 48. Christian missions achieved some measure of success in Manado and the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi, in Flores, and in West —Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge, 2005): 22. The Christianisation of Sumatra’s Batak lands began in the 1860s, and was largely complete by 1900 among the Toba Batak — Anthony Reid, An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (Singapore, 2005): 15. Strongly Muslim regions like Sumatra and West Java were barred from Christian missionary activity (as were Bali and Lombok because, among other reasons, the Dutch wanted to preserve the Hindu exceptionalism of these islands). The 2000 Indonesian Census showed that 88% of Indonesians considered themselves to be Muslims and almost 9% are Christians — Leo Suryadinata, Evi Nurvidya Arifin and Aris Ananta, Indonesia’s Population: Ethnicity and Religion in a Changing Political Landscape (Singapore, 2003): 104. Overall, therefore, Christians comprise a small part of the Indonesian population. However, there are high concentrations of Christians in East Nusa Tenggara (where they comprise almost 90% of the population); Papua (where they are around 75% of the population); North Sulawesi (around 50% of the population are Christian here); and Maluku (around 40% of the population are Christian). Interestingly, around 35% of the population of , a region usually associated with Islam, is also Christian — Suryadinata et al: 117.

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and sacred sites, and to encounter Muslims, who comprised the largest proportion of the population. Ancient Hindu and Buddhist monuments, the relics of a pre-Islamic past, also dotted the landscapes of the Indies, particularly on Java. On Bali, colonists found the island’s people still practicing a variant of . It was this religion, in its living and extinct forms, that most intrigued Dutch artists and scholars, as well as the wider colonial public. Tropical nature occupied an important position in colonial representations of Hindu landscapes, both as a picturesque context in which dramatic ruins were contained, and as a backdrop against which European fantasies about Eastern religions could be projected.

European images of Islamic landscapes were far less prone to idealisation, particularly from the late colonial period when Dutch concerns about Islamic militancy reached their zenith. Certainly, the natural landscapes that hosted Islamic populations — including Aceh, where Dutch artists began to venture in the late nineteenth century — were noted with appreciation. Interested observers also diligently recorded the presence of Islam in Indies landscapes in the form of mosques and Muslim graves. However, following the onset of the Aceh War in the 1870s, Muslim landscapes were increasingly associated in Dutch minds with anti-colonial resistance. The war signalled a significant turning point in this regard. Earlier conflicts that had incorporated Islamic opposition to Dutch interference in local politics were not memorialised in Indies landscapes by colonial artists and writers to the same extent. The late nineteenth century therefore heralded an unprecedented new strand of colonial concern with the contours of some Indies landscapes, which suddenly appeared inimical and hostile to the fantasy of exotic tranquility that had more frequently informed European art from the Indies.3

F Reconstructing sacred landscapes — Antiquities on Java G

3 In the following discussion I will be drawing frequently upon the research of Anthony Reid (2005) and Michael Laffan (2000), (2003). Their work investigates the complex historical reasons behind growing (and sometimes unfounded) western fears, from the late nineteenth century, about the rise of pan-Islamism in Southeast Asia.

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It was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that British and Dutch explorers on Java first came across the remains of some of the most significant Hindu and Buddhist ruins in Southeast Asia. In 1814, Thomas Stamford Raffles claimed discovery of the Borobudur temple in Central Java near Yogyakarta, completed in the early ninth century CE under the auspices of the Buddhist Shailendra dynasty. It is the largest Buddhist monument in Indonesia, and is now maintained as a World Heritage site.4 The temple, situated on a plain surrounded by mountain ranges, including the sacred (and volatile) Mt Merapi, was built upon an existing hill in the shape of a tiered mountain. Its lower terraces are walled and decorated with stone carvings that narrate the ascent to enlightenment, beginning with scenes from earthly life and progressing, on the higher terraces, to scenes from the life of the Buddha. The topmost three tiers of the temple are circular, open, and contain no carvings. These tiers are dotted with bell-shaped stupas containing Buddha figures. It has been suggested that this section of the temple represents the ideal formlessness of enlightenment.5 The first restoration of Borobudur was completed between 1907 and 1911, with subsequent restorations to follow in the post-colonial period.

The Sanjaya dynasty signalled its divergent religious allegiances by constructing a monumental Shivaite temple complex not far from the Borobudur. It too was completed in the early ninth century. The complex was first seen by Europeans in the late eighteenth century,6 and soon after subjected to a restoration program (1806–7). The site at Prambanan boasts a central monument to , flanked by shrines devoted to Brahma and Vishnu, plus smaller temples for their mounts. The carvings around the temples celebrate guardians and entertainers, and relay stories from the Ramayana.7

The ‘discovery’ of these impressive temples by Europeans aroused keen popular as well as

4 Ken Taylor, ‘Cultural landscape as open air musuem: Borobudur World Heritage Site and its setting’, Humanities Research, 10(2), 2003: 51–2. Taylor presents an interesting discussion on how the Borobudur is now a site of tourist pilgrimage, and he argues that the spritual and social meaning of Borobudur in Java today represents a drastic departure from its meaning before the twentieth century. 5 Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca and New York, 1967): 42–6. 6 Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk, Het Indië Boek (Zwolle, 2001): 47. 7 Holt: 54–7.

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scholarly interest during the colonial period. The Borobudur was particularly appealing to the broader public, it seems, who were able to purchase postcards of the temple from the late nineteenth century onward.8 Well-known photographers like Woodbury and Page and Kassian Cephas, official photographer to the Sultan’s court at Yogyakarta, also produced pictures of the temple [Plate 1].9 Scholars and wealthy amateur enthusiasts expressed equal interest in the temples. These observers invested in expensive volumes of lithographs — usually published in installments over several years to spread the cost over time — that showcased artists’ impressions or photographs of the ruins.10 Some specialised works (catering for audiences with an interest in archaeology, for example) appealed to a smaller clientele. In the late nineteenth century, when photographs of Isidore van Kinsbergen’s (1821–1905) endeavours on Bali, Java and Madura were published, the collection of images attracted only fifty buyers.11

The draughtsmen who were involved in the colonial expeditions that Borobudur, Prambanan and other Javanese temple ruins inspired frequently produced images that privileged the agency of Europeans in discovering and restoring antiquities. To be the first to discover or bring to the world an image of an ostensibly long-forgotten sacred site excited the intrepid impulses of colonists who often saw themselves at the vanguard of natural and historical discovery. Ruined temples seemed to invite the application of vigorous scientific energy in the form of exploration, discovery, analysis and

8 For examples, see Leo Haks and Steven Wachlin, Indonesia: 500 Early Postcards (Singapore, 2004): 164–5. 9 See, for example, the photograph of Borobudur taken by the Woodbury and Page studio around 1866, in Steve Wachlin: 116. See also the photographs of Borobudur by Kassian Cephas, taken in the late nineteenth century, in Gerrit Knaap, Cephas, Yogyakarta: Photography in the Service of the Sultan (Leiden, 1999): 103-10. Cephas also took pictures of Prambanan: 112–16. Other photographers to have taken images of Borobudur in the nineteenth century were Adolph Schaeffer and Isidore van Kinsbergen. 10 John Bastin and Bea Brommer, Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of Indonesia (Utrecht, 1979): 26–7. For example, Javasche Oudheden (Javanese Antiquities), to which the artist AJ Bik was a contributor, was published in The Hague in installments between 1852 and 1856, and was never completed. 11 Anneke Groeneveld, ‘Photography in aid of science’ in Toekang Portret: 100 Years of Photography in the Dutch East Indies 1839–1939 (Amsterdam, 1989): 18, 20.

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reconstruction.12 Europeans were consequently often shown as the directors of a project, and as the intellectual force behind the resurrection of a ruin.

The renowned picture of the restoration of Candi Sewu at Prambanan under the guidance of HC Cornelius provides a case in point [Plate 2]. The foreground of the drawing, which was produced by Cornelius himself, is peopled with a small army of Javanese labourers who perform the manual work of restoration: shifting heavy stonework and removing creeping verdure from the ruins. The management of the site and the engineering work is clearly presided over by Europeans like Cornelius, distinguished by their oddly inappropriate top hats and coat tails and shown clambering over the ruins, engaged in measuring and surveying activities. Cornelius’ image of the restoration work blithely celebrated the industry and intellectual vigour of Europeans who were, ironically, busily stripping the site of its potency, according to Javanese understandings of angker (‘haunted’ or ‘sacred’), where undisturbed, overgrown ruins are held in the highest regard.13 Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that local Javanese were perfectly aware of Prambanan before its ‘discovery’ by colonial explorers.14 Nineteenth century European restoration projects like those conducted by Cornelius therefore indicated an important disjuncture between colonial and indigenous concepts of sacred landscapes.

The work of some colonial artists suggests that they did ponder the historical and contemporary meaning of antique sacred sites. Landscape played an important role in the portrayal of a temple’s significance, often in ways that were respectful (inadvertantly or otherwise) of Hindu-Javanese cosmology. Antoine Payen, the government painter who accompanied the Reinwardt expeditions of the 1820s, produced a slew of drawings of the temples of Central Java between 1823 and 1825. These sites clearly piqued his imagination.

12 ‘[T]he grandeurs of ancient sites’, Benedict Anderson has written, ‘were successively disinterred, unjungled, measured, photographed, reconstructed, fenced off, analysed, and displayed’ — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (revised edition) (London and New York, 1993): 179. 13 Peter Boomgaard, ‘Oriental nature, its friends and its enemies: Conservation of nature in late-colonial Indonesia, 1889–1949’, Environment and History, 5(3), 1999: 263. See also Chapter 1 of this thesis. 14 Annabel Teh Gallop, Early Views of Indonesia: Drawings from the British Library (London, 1995): 19.

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Payen’s image of Candi Sewu at Prambanan seems to intuit the cosmological rationale for the location of the temple: it included the mountain backdrop that provided the natural context for the site [Plate 3]. During the 1850s, when Javasche Oudheden (Javanese Antiquities) was published, several artists showed temples with Javanese figures if not in explicit worship, then in quiet reverence or awe before the structures.15

The chief purpose of the draughtsmen who accompanied European restoration works was of course to aid the project by producing careful drawings of artifacts and architecture for research, restoration and posterity. Accuracy and detail were their main objectives, as they were for the photographers who followed expeditions in the latter half of the nineteenth century. (In fact, the earliest application of photography in the Indies — during the 1840s — was associated with an archaeological expedition).16 But artists with a more creative bent were also drawn to the antiquities of Central Java. Indeed, the Romantic fascination for ruins seemed to inform the interest of several colonial artists, including Hubertus Nicolaas Sieburgh (1799–1842). Sieburgh was an unusual visitor to the Indies in the context of travel before the 1870 Agrarian Laws, which opened the colonies to further emigration. He had no professional brief to fulfill in the Indies and consequently had to seek special permission from the authorities in order to journey there. Inspired by an appetite for picturesque ruins and an inclination for adventure, Sieburgh sought to make a comprehensive record of Indies antiquities for the benefit of Dutch audiences at home.17 Sadly, apart from minor triumphs such as becoming the first European to portray Candi ,18 Sieburgh’s self-funded four years in the Indies came to little and he died there at

15 See the image of Modjo-Païd by J Weissenbruch after Auguste van Pers (1815–71), which shows a lone native figure seated before a ruin, apparently in reverie — in Bastin and Brommer: 70. See also Antoine Payen’s image of Borobudur, which shows a small group of Javanese almost worshipfully surrounding a stone Buddha figure — in Scalliet (1995): plate 40. 16 Groeneveld: 16. 17 Marie-Odette Scalliet, ‘ “Back to nature” in the East Indies: European painters in the nineteenth century East Indies’ in Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics (Amsterdam, 1999): 67. 18 Scalliet (1999): 69.

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the age of 43, virtually penniless and without having achieved his ambitions.19

Sieburgh’s passion for the antique wonders of Java’s landscapes united intellectual curiosity with artistic fervour and a growing colonial penchant for the ancient, exotic religions of Asia. The special appeal of old Hindu and Buddhist ruins on Java, however, was that their cultural and spiritual significance seemed all but dormant, and therefore especially mysterious, to European observers. After all, in colonial reckoning (and, as mentioned earlier, in contradistinction to Javanese concepts of sacredness), sites like Prambanan and Borobudur had suffered abandonment, fallen into ruin and been reclaimed by wilderness. Java’s temple landscapes, then, were like blank spaces littered with tantalising puzzle pieces for colonial scholar-explorers to reconfigure. Indeed, some views of temple sites were constructed by colonial artists as landscapes fragmented into so many component parts of a monumental musuem. In an image by Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, the draughtsman even figuratively turns his back on the temple altogether in order to display the smaller archaeological spoils of the site.20 Elsewhere in the Indies, colonists would have the opportunity to test their ideas about the ancient landscapes of Java against the sacred spaces of a living culture — Bali.

F Constructing a living museum — Religion and landscape on Bali G

Unlike Java, where Hinduism and Buddhism had largely been supplanted by Islam in the indigenous population,21 Bali offered Europeans the opportunity to observe what colonists

19 Bastin and Brommer: 334; Scalliet (1999): 68, 71. 20 See the lithograph taken from Borobudur looking toward Mt Sumbing by CW Mieling after FW Junghuhn, from Java, zijne Gedaante, zijn Plantentooi en Inwendige Bouw (Java, its Shape, its Flora and Internal Structure) (The Hague, 1853–4) — in Bastin and Brommer: 260. 21 With the important exception of places like the Tengger ranges in East Java, where some highlanders refer to themselves as Hindu — see Robert Hefner, The Political Economy of Mountain Java (Berkeley, 1990): 4. Note also that Buddhist temples remained an important feature of landscape in Chinese communities in the Indies, as photographic records of Batavia frequently demonstrated — see, for example, Scott Merrillees, Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs (Surrey, 2000).

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came to define as living Hindu practices. Further, colonial artists on Bali did not respond to sacred sites with the same scholarly, reconstructive zeal that was applied on Java. Part of the explanation for this no doubt lies in the much later subjugation of Bali by colonists compared to Java. Bali’s place in the Netherlands Indies was not formally secured until the early 1900s; Java’s subjugation, on the other hand, was already well under way by 1830, when the uprising led by Diponegoro and his followers was finally quelled. Java’s antiquities (many of them located in Central Java) were therefore familiar objects of historical inquiry to Europeans by the time that Bali was conquered. Bali’s subjugation also came after the Agrarian Laws, when restrictions on emigration to the Indies were lifted and artists, scholars and curious travellers took their places alongside the professional colonists who had once exclusively comprised the European population of the Indies. Improvements to international transport and communications from the late nineteenth century meant that Europeans could venture to and through the Indies faster and with greater ease than ever before. This attracted the archipelago’s first modern tourists, many of whom came palette in hand seeking artistic inspiration.22

As demonstrated in the previous chapter, European artists on Bali rarely allowed the reality of daily life under colonial rule to taint their idyllic impressions of the island’s landscapes. As with colonial images of indigenous villages, representations of Hindu sites were in keeping with official and painterly views of Bali as a living museum of antique, peaceful, depoliticised landscapes. Most European artists approached these spaces in a less documentary, more imaginative fashion than artists on Java adopted with respect to Hindu and Buddhist relics. The scholarly imperative of reconstruction, after all, was qualitatively different (though never absent) in a context where a variant of Hinduism remained in daily practice. On Java, artists could only speculate on the spiritual contours of pre-Islamic landscapes. Bali, on the other hand, was regarded by colonists (often erroneously, as we saw in the previous chapter) as a time capsule of sorts, in that it seemed to offer Europeans a glimpse of what Java might have looked like before the conversion to Islam. The Muslim faith, as we shall see below, was treated with great caution by Dutch colonists. The protracted war in Aceh that ushered the Dutch East Indies empire into the twentieth century

22 See Adrian Vickers, ‘The birth of Bali the paradise’ in Bali: A Paradise Created (Singapore, 1996).

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did little to abate colonial fears about militant Islam in the region. By contrast, Bali’s Hindu landscapes seemed to offer colonial artists a benign ideal of non-Christian worship, one that was represented by colonists as tranquil and meditative, indicative of attention to exotic ritual rather than incendiary dogma, and importantly, closer to nature than to politics.

Religion on Bali was of course neither benign nor apolitical. Nineteenth century Christian missions to the island were patently unsuccesful; in fact, local responses to foreign evangelists in North Bali were so hostile that the colonial government banned further missions until the twentieth century.23 After Dutch rule had been more or less consolidated on the island and the political influence of most Balinese rulers had been curtailed, indigenous elites clung to their religious authority as a way to retain their status.24 In the minds of many Balinese themselves, then, it was quite likely that religion and politics were as closely connected in the dawning twentieth century as they had always been.

Nonetheless, European artists eagerly gave themselves over to the attractions of Bali’s sacred landscapes. Their images often reveal a genuine interest in and understanding of Balinese cosmology which, as discussed in Chapter 1, dictated the spatial arrangement of temples relative to landmarks like mountains and the sea. A drawing by WOJ Nieuwenkamp (1874–1950), one of the first significant Dutch artists on Bali, provides a case in point. Nieuwenkamp arrived in Bali in 1903, on his second trip to the Indies, and witnessed the 1906 puputan at Badung.25 The son of a merchant trader who had dealt in Malukan spices, Nieuwenkamp was privileged to indulge a passion for illustration, as well as an affection for Bali, that was financed by his own family’s fortunes as well as those of his wife. He produced several books on the art and culture of Bali and nearby

23 Vickers (1996): 33. Vickers cites the example of local responses to the missionary Rutger van Eck, active in the mid-nineteenth century, who achieved one conversion to : a man who subsequently murdered Van Eck’s successor. 24 Vickers (1996): 135–6. 25 Ruud Spruit, Artists on Bali (Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur, 1997): 16, 18.

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Lombok.26 Nieuwenkamp’s 1904 drawing of the Batur temple demonstrates his awareness of its orientation to the sacred mountain after which it was named.27 Like many other European observers on Bali, Nieuwenkamp was convinced that the island was an endangered paradise, and he decried any changes to its landscapes such as sealed roads and modern buildings.28 Ironically, it was Nieuwenkamp’s own association with western technologies that characterised the way he was remembered on Bali. His tour of the north aboard a bicycle in 1906–7 was memorialised on a stone relief in the Pura Maduwe temple at Kubutambahan.29

One of Nieuwenkamp’s later drawings, completed in 1937, best demonstrates his attitude toward Balinese sacred landscapes as tranquil, meditative, and mystically connected to nature. In Besakih the viewer’s gaze follows that of a Balinese boy, seen from behind and seated on a wall in the foreground [Plate 4]. The boy looks toward the sea, which lies before a terraced landscape punctuated by temples. In the middle distance a lone figure sweeps the grounds with a broom. From the right, a rainstorm descends upon the scene. The unity between nature — the sea, the approaching storm — and the ritual function of the temple is strongly implied. The resting boy in the centre of the picture seems to be experiencing a quiet, solitary moment of contemplation. His presence is crucial in directing the viewer’s consciousness of the scene as an ‘authentically’ Balinese mode of engaging with sacred Hindu landscapes.

Nieuwenkamp’s drawing explored a moment of spiritual reflection in real time. In Walter Spies’ undated painting entitled (as diverse works of his were) Landscape, the artist was, characteristically, interested in the way that deep time was implicated in Balinese landscapes [Plate 5]. It was this quality of historical continuity that for Spies typified the

26 Spruit (1997): 18; and Jeannette ten Kate, ‘Painting in a garden of Eden: European artists in Bali during the first half of the twentieth century’, in Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics (Amsterdam, 1999): 131. 27 Spruit (1997): 30. 28 Ruud Spruit, Indonesian Impressions: Oriental Themes in Western Painting (Wijk and Aalburg, 1992): 16; and Ten Kate: 131. 29 Spruit (1992): 17; Ten Kate: 131.

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island’s sacred spaces. In his painting a mountainous, densely forested vista opens before the viewer, spectacularly illuminated by golden sunlight. It is flanked on either side by a closer, much darker landscape that seems to put the firey mountains into a relief indicative of time past. The image of a temple complex silhouetted against the night sky is reflected in a still pool of water along the top edge of the picture. The Hindu landscapes of the present, then, are distant in Spies’ painting, while the primaeval landscapes of the pre-Hindu past are foregrounded. Was Spies suggesting that the darkened temple landscape of the present merely mimicked the greatness of the natural landscape of Bali’s past?

It is of course difficult to say so conclusively. However, both Spies’ and Nieuwenkamp’s images provide a telling insight into early twentieth century European responses to Balinese ritual landscapes that differed strikingly from representations of sacred spaces by Balinese artists. Spies privileged Balinese nature over more recent, formal structures of worship, while Nieuwenkamp connected built and natural landscapes in his version of sacred spaces. Both artists constructed curiously empty landscapes, sparsely peopled in the latter case and totally unpopulated in the former. Further, and somewhat paradoxically, Nieuwenkamp’s central, solitary Balinese figure suggested that individual human reflection was at the core of Balinese religious experience, and that deities were abstract, if not invisible, entities. This represents a view of spirituality that privileges individual, introspective worship over communal, expressive forms of religious observance. Balinese depictions of sacred Hindu spaces, in contrast to Spies’ vacant landscape and Nieuwenkamp’s lonely vista, are usually teeming with human life. Forests, mountains and rice fields typically burst forth from the surface of Balinese art, while sacred landscapes are chiefly characterised by human — and supernatural — activity. Religious festivals appear as pageants of worshippers, gods and spirits, all crowded within the same landscape, often with frightening vividness [Plate 6].30

30 See generally the examples from the artists of Batuan that were collected by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the late 1930s, presented and analysed in Hildred Geertz, Images of Power: Balinese Paintings Made for Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (Honolulu, 1994). It is worth remembering that religion and mythology were also important themes in pre-twentieth century wayang-style art — see the examples in Jean Couteau, Museum Puri Lukisan (Ubud, 1999). For an early twentieth century instance of the wayang tradition executed in a much sparser, graphic style, see the work of I Gusti Nyoman Lémpad (1862–1978), with pertinent examples in Suteja Neka and Garret Kam, The

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Indeed, the recent anthropological work of Hildred Geertz seems to confirm that Balinese religious art expresses the belief that human links with gods and spirits are public and contemporaneous, not historical and internalised, particularly during religious festivals when sacred landscapes come alive, as it were, with supernatural beings.31 Further, Geertz has argued that ‘Balinese ritual draws not so much from the respect and the worship given the cosmic potency of their gods as from the terrible anxieties of impending or continuing physical suffering due to godly anger … all Balinese rituals are at base propitiations of potentially destructive spiritual beings … followed by rituals of gratititude …’.32 The colonial ideal of the sacred Balinese landscape, then, was deeply incongruent with the realities of Hindu-Balinese worship, and with the modes of representation that indigenous artists employed to depict it.

Development of Painting in Bali: Selections from the Neka Art Museum (2nd Ed) (Ubud, 2000): 66–7. 31 In Geertz’s first book on the matter, Images of Power (1994): 2, 32, she argued that the paintings collected by the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Batuan in 1937 revealed local concerns with sakti (the power of both good and evil), and the mobilisation of this power in temple rituals. Balinese religious life, according to Geertz’s interpretation of these paintings, is pervaded by spirits in conflict with one another and with humans. Balinese cosmology accounts for niskala (intangible qualities) as well as sikala (tangible qualities). Because the powers of spirits and cosmos are niskala, they must become sikala in order to have material consequences. Religious ceremonies aid this transformative function. In her follow-up to this work, The Life of a Balinese Temple: Artistry, Imagination, and History in a Peasant Village (Honolulu, 2004): 7,–8, 20, 66–7, 244, Hildred Geertz looked at temple art and rituals at the Pura Desa Batuan (village temple of Batuan) and argued that to locals the temple carvings were tenget, which has similar meanings to the Javanese angker: sacred, haunted, or animated by spirits. These carvings have an instrumental function — they aid the interaction of humans, spirits, deities and demons. Temple ceremonies function as royal receptions for deities, who assemble with their entourages at the temple where they are worshipped, fed and entertained by the human congregation. The general purpose of a Balinese temple, therefore, is to provide a place for niskala beings to stay while they visit the material world. (Interestingly, Geertz found that the Indic Hindu gods were rarely addressed in these local ceremonies, because they were believed to come from further away). Geertz ultimately concluded that it is probably inaccurate to refer to Balinese temple carvings as ‘art’ in the sense usually meant by western scholars. 32 Geertz (2004): 73.

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F Islamic landscapes — An anti-ideal G

Europeans expressed a diligent interest in the Islamic sites of the Indies. Mosques and Muslim graves attracted draughtsmen and painters in the same way that Christian churches and important public buildings did: they were represented as significant landmarks of colonial cities. Hand-drawn and photographic images of mosques in particular were common additions to colonial albums. There is evidence to suggest, however, that Dutch scholars and architects were often disappointed with the indigenous forms that Indies mosques assumed. Throughout Southeast Asia the timber pavilion model had found favour among Muslim architects: multi-tiered roofs and open halls stabilised by central wooden pillars traditionally dominated.33 It was not until the late nineteenth century that the first domes were added to mosques in North Sumatra and Malaya, usually at the instigation of colonial authorities who fancied the Mughal and Indo-Saracenic styles to represent ‘authentic’ Islamic architecture.34 Indeed, after the destruction of the mosque at Kota Raja, Aceh, in 1873 during fighting around the royal compound, a colonial architect built a new, domed mosque — an innovation that local religious leaders considered alien at first, and therefore inappropriate for worship [Plate 7].35

Images of Muslim graves, which often functioned as sites of pilgrimage, were also popular among colonial image-makers. One photograph from 1906, for example, captures a penghulu (chief mosque official) paying his respects to the grave of a haji near Pandeglang.36 More common were simple images of grave stones, which were usually

33 Hugh O’Neill, ‘Southeast Asia’ in Martin Frishman and Hasan-Uddin Khan (eds), The Mosque: History, Architectural Development and Regional Diversity (London, 1991): 225, 227, 233. 34 O’Neill: 225. The Indo-Saracenic and Mughal styles dominated during the British Raj — an interesting insight into the way that colonial powers borrowed ideals from one another. 35 Building of the mosque was complete in 1881 — O’Neill: 225. Jean Gelman Taylor also provides an image, in her recent Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (New Haven and London, 2003): 259, of the Bait ur- Rahman mosque in Aceh, replete with dome as it was rebuilt in 1897 following the design of an Italian architect. 36 Image #17815, KITLV. Michael Laffan notes that to visit the graves of holy men was popular because they were seen as sources of spiritual energy — Michael L Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia:

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depicted in neutral terms, perhaps as archaeological curiosities.37 On Java, and in keeping with indigenous notions of keramat (an Arabic loan word that applies an Islamic notion of sacredness to certain landscapes), many of these old grave sites had remained largely untouched.

Dutch colonists must have been acutely aware of the Islamic world that they had transplanted themselves into. Colonial industries that employed Muslims sometimes made provisions for worshippers, as was the case with the rail company on Sumatra’s west coast that provided prayer rooms for its Muslim staff.38 Certainly, the colonial state had to heed Muslim opinion on matters of religious policy. Indeed, the constitution of the Indies forbade the state from interfering in religious matters unless law and order were at stake.39 Some areas of public policy were particularly controversial, notably regulations governing the family. In 1937, for instance, in response to widespread protest from Muslim groups on Java, the government was forced to withdraw proposals for legislation that would have outlawed polygamy.40 Colonial encroachment on private Muslim domains, then (the odd photograph of Muslims at prayer notwithstanding),41 was generally beyond the powers of the Dutch administration.

The political potency of Islam was what distinguished it in official colonial minds from other Indies religions. Unlike the antique sacred landscapes of Java, where Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and social systems ostensibly lay dormant, and the religious sites of Bali,

The ‘Umma’ Below the Winds (London and New York, 2003): 29. 37 The KITLV holds a number of photographs of Muslim gravestones, several from a site in Pekalongan taken around 1890 by an unknown person (see #18695, #18697–710). See also #28087, a photograph of the burial site of Adulrachman (a major saint) at Geudong in Aceh, whose gravestone announces that he died 3 December 1329. 38 As demonstrated by a photograph from the album of one CL de Voogt, former head of operations for the rail authority, which was presented to him in 1935 upon his resignation: KITLV, image #52758. 39 Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘Monogamous marriage and female citizenship in the Dutch East Indies, 1898-1938’ in Maria Grever and Fia Dienteren (eds), A Fatherland for Women (Amsterdam, 2000): 144. 40 Locher-Scholten (2000b): 142–3, 146. 41 See, for example, KITLV image #41517, taken 23/07/1948 by Mevrouw U Douwes Dekker-Grebbe, showing Muslims at prayer in a mosque on Sumatra’s east coast.

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which seemed mystical but benign to western observers, Islamic landscapes were difficult to idealise because the Muslims who peopled them were numerous, vocal and increasingly conscious of engaging in a larger Islamic world.42 Indeed, in contrast to Hindu landscapes, which were confined to small parts of Java and the diminutive island of Bali, Islamic landscapes stretched across most of the rest of the Indonesian archipelago and beyond. Islam reigned as the chief religion among some of the Indies’ closest neighbours, including British Malaya and, of course, more distant lands like Arabia. The latter had become more proximate to the Indies since the advent of travel by steamship. Indies Muslims undertaking the haj journeyed to Mecca in greater numbers in the latter half of the nineteenth century than ever before.43 As Michael Laffan has pointed out, among the literate Muslim classes of insular Southeast Asia, the notion of an association with a larger Islamic community had for centuries been expressed in the designation of the region as the ‘umma below the winds’ of the monsoon — south of but indelibly connected to the Arab holy lands. 44

Certainly, Islam in the Indies was the subject of much scholarship and keen official interest. Karel Holle (1825–96), a Dutch-born civil servant and member of the Java plantocracy, cultivated a concerted interest in Islam. He took a native wife, converted to Islam and went

42 Anthony Reid has written on the growing consciousness among Southeast Asian Muslims as belonging to a larger Islamic world: see ‘Nineteenth century pan-Islam below the winds’ in An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (Singapore, 2005). See particularly Reid’s argument that Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern Muslims began to share a common sense of European colonists as enemies during the nineteenth century: 228, 247. See also the recent work of Michael Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The ‘Umma’ Below the Winds (London and New York, 2003), and his earlier case study of official Dutch (and, to a lesser extent, British) responses to an alleged pan-Islamic plot involving Javanese Muslims and Meccan Arabs during the early 1880s — ‘ “A watchful eye”: The Meccan plot of 1881 and changing Dutch perceptions of Islam in Indonesia’, Archipel, 63, 2000: 79–108. 43 Laffan (2003): 33, 39, 47, 49. Laffan also argues that the Suez Canal encouraged Indies Muslims to journey to Mecca in greater numbers. He posits that before 1869, when the canal was built, the Dutch estimated about 100 Indies Muslims a year went to Mecca. By 1894, Indies Muslims were the single largest ethnic group of pilgrims in Mecca. Vickers (2005): 52 estimates that, leading up to the Great Depression, there were about 40,000 Indies pilgrims to Mecca annually. Colonial photographs document this popular journey — see KITLV image #19697, taken in 1901, in the Muntz album. 44 See the title of Laffan’s (2003) book, and his use of the term throughout, especially at pp 10 and 13.

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by a Muslim name, Said Mohamad ben Holle. In 1871, Holle was named Honorary Advisor on Native Affairs to the colonial government. Two years later, he travelled to Singapore with his brother-in-law to monitor regional responses to the Dutch invasion of Aceh. Holle’s stance on Islam in the Indies was that it ought to be given as little political authority as possible: radicalism should be suppressed and hajis barred from the civil service — policies that, according to Laffan, were unofficially adopted by the colonial state after 1873.45

Holle’s successor as consultant to the government represented a new and different breed of highly educated official, schooled in Indology, who permeated the civil service from the late nineteenth century.46 Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) reigned as advisor on Native and Arab Affairs between 1891 and 1907. He too was a Muslim convert, venturing so far as to spend half a year in Mecca in 1885 (although he never completed the haj).47 Snouck Hurgronje is generally portrayed by contemporary historians as having been more genuinely sympathetic to Islam than his predecessor.48 Like Holle, however, he was keen to separate Islam from politics in the Indies, and one of his most famous collaborations was with Colonel JB van Heutsz during the 1898–1900 campaign in Aceh which saw, among other tactical changes, the deliberate targetting of the ulamas (scholars and teachers of

45 Laffan (2003): 79, 81–2. Holle was keen to remove from office those native civil servants who demonstrated religious ‘zealotry’ through the wearing of Arab costume, leading Friday prayers, or completing the haj — Laffan (2000): 95. Officially, Holle’s alarmist views were disregarded, certainly with respect to his response to the so-called ‘Meccan plot’ of the early 1880s, which is detailed by Michael Laffan (2000): 97–9. In this instance, the colonial government followed the more moderate advice of LWC van den Berg, official advisor to the Department of Education. 46 Snouck Hurgronje was fluent in Arabic and its classical texts, as was common among scholars of Indology from Leiden in the late nineteenth century — Laffan (2003): 74. He was of course also renowned for his development of the policy of ‘associationism’, whereby the people of the Indies were meant to progress toward modernity through adopting the secular approaches toward government and education favoured by the Dutch. 47 Laffan (2003): 61–2, 71–2. 48 Laffan (2003): 55. See also Karel Steenbrink, Dutch Colonialism and Indonesian Islam: Contact and Conflicts 1596–1950 (Amsterdam, 1993): 78–80, 87–97, on Holle and Snouck Hurgronje.

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Islam) who had galvanised rebel support on religious grounds.49

Jean Gelman Taylor has recently demonstrated how, since the late colonial period, views of Aceh, both within and outside Indonesia, have privileged images of war and conflict over more diverse views of the region and its people.50 Academic studies and visual presentations of Aceh’s history often tend to focus on images of conflict.51 However, Taylor’s recent preliminary survey of the the KITLV image archive suggests that a richer impression of Aceh’s past might be reconstructed, one that takes into account its art, culture and social customs as well as its political and military history. The images by an artist named OGH Heldring, who ventured to Aceh around the same time that the conflict with the Dutch began, serve to illustrate.52 Heldring’s views were part of an album entitled Oost Java en Atjeh, 1880–1883: Schetsen naar de Natuur Genomen (East Java and Aceh, 1880-1883: Treasures Taken from Nature). The artist depicted Aceh’s natural landscapes with an appreciation for their beauty and exoticism, in much the same way that European newcomers integrated views of other parts of the Indies into Dutch notions of the tropics.53

Taylor’s research suggests at an intriguing new line of inquiry for scholars of Aceh, one that may fundamentally alter the way in which its histories are told in the future. Taylor’s paper also links Dutch views of Aceh that were constructed from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the latter stages of the Aceh War, with more recent views of the region that emphasise its querulous, militant past. Contemporary, official Indonesian histories continue to depict Aceh as warlike because it has frequently resisted centralised

49 Laffan (2003): 89, 93–4. The 1898–1900 campaign also ushered in the switch among Dutch forces to the guerrilla methods used by their enemy. 50 Jean Gelman Taylor, ‘Aceh: Photographic narratives’, Paper presented to the KITLV Rethinking Indonesian Histories Project, November 2005 (forthcoming publication). I am most grateful to Jean for sharing this recent research with me. 51 Taylor (2005): 5–6. 52 Taylor (2005): 19. 53 See Heldring’s two drawings of a mountain entitled De Gle Raja (The Gle Raja), #36D-454 and #37B-549, KITLV image archive.

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attempts to be integrated into the Republic of Indonesia.54 The latter issue is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it is worth considering the nature of Dutch views of the region from the late colonial period, which were distinguished by their conflation of Aceh’s landscapes not only with conflict but, more crucially, with Islam.

The war in Aceh represented a crucial turning point in Dutch colonial attitudes to Islam in the Indies. Earlier conflicts, like the Diponegoro War (1825–30) in Java and even the Padri Wars (1820–41)55 in the Minangkabau lands of Sumatra do not appear to have made the same depth of impact on Dutch consciousness of Islamic resistance against colonial rule in the Indies. Diponegoro’s upbringing away from the kraton in a pesantren (Muslim religious school) was doubtless a formative experience, and he initially attracted strong support from Islamic leaders.56 His objections to the collusion of Central Java’s ruling class with the Dutch were partially grounded in his belief that the colonists were infidels who ought to be ejected from Muslim lands.57 Diponegoro was even pictured on occasion in Turkish garb.58 However, as mentioned in Chapter 4, Dutch images of Central Java soon after the war, such as FVHA de Stuers’ Mémoires sur la Guerre de L’ile Java (Leiden, 1833), touted a triumphalist form of amnesia regarding the effects of the conflict on the landscape, and the Islamist contours of the resistance.

54 Taylor (2005): 1, 8, 18. 55 See Reid (2005) for these dates. Reid presents the Padri Wars as a series of conflicts that did not really end until the late 1930s: 234. 56 MC Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia Since c 1200 (3rd Ed) (Basingstoke, 2001): 150–1. Laffan notes that Diponegoro had a spiritual advisor, Haji Madja, who was connected to Islamic revivalist movements — Laffan (2001): 30. 57 Colin Brown, A Short History of Indonesia: The Unlikely Nation? (Crows Nest, 2003): 77. Economic hardships brought upon Javanese farmers under colonial rule represented another major grievance leading up to the conflict — Ricklefs (2001): 150. 58 Diponegoro appears in a vaguely Turkish costume in Nicolaas Peineman’s paintings, The Arrest of Diponegoro, discussed in Chapter 4. Raden Saleh also painting Diponegoro in Turkish garb for his interpretation of the event in The Capture of Diponegoro, discussed in Chapter 1.

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De Stuers’ images of the fighting itself were distant and sanitised,59 and his tranquil views of the aftermath of the war depict a landscape blank of religious influence. At the same time, de Stuers was careful to emphasise the total victory of the Dutch against their adversaries. The military charts of enemy territory60 that he included in his album committed to posterity (with jubilant hindsight) the topographical knowledge and strategic intentions that the colonists armed themselves with during the war. Following the narrative of the album, these two-dimensional, strategic plans underwent a perfect conversion into three-dimensional, practical realities. Maps of contentious war-time spaces were fleshed out after the Dutch victory as pictures of peaceful, pacified landscapes. The finished lithographs adopted the authoritative panoramic perspective that confirmed Dutch subjugation of the territory.61 Indeed, after 1830 the Dutch annexed Yogyakarta’s outer districts, leaving the Central Javanese courts deprived of their traditional tributary lands (albeit in return for generous salaries) and, in the words of MC Ricklefs, rendered ‘docile’ thereafter.62

Images of the Aceh War that began in North Sumatra four decades later represented a striking contrast to these confident pictures of conflict with Islamic rebels from the 1830s. Historians have typically viewed the Aceh War as the logical result of moves to consolidate the borders of the Netherlands Indies in the context of rival European empires encroaching upon Dutch possessions.63 Michael Laffan has recently reversed the logic of this process by suggesting that Dutch colonial expansion occured partly in response to the perceived threat

59 See Une des quatorze colonnes mobiles, traversant des rizières et détachant quelques hommes contre une petite bande de rebelles (KITLV image #47B-3); and, perhaps more importantly, Le prince Diepo Negoro, ventrant dans les habitations préparées pour lui et ses troupes après sa soumission au Magellang, le 8 Mars 1830 (KITLV image #47B-12). 60 Esquisse d’un partie du terrain de Mataram, indiquant les mouvements Diepo Negoro (KITLV image #47B-11) and Plan de l’investissment et de la Prise du kraton à Pleret (KITLV image #47B-1). 61 See discussion in Chapter 4. 62 Ricklefs (2001): 153. 63 See, for example, Ricklefs (2001): 186, who cites Dutch fears about American intervention in the region in 1873. See also Brown (2003): 98, on the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1871, which formally quelled long-standing Dutch fears of British interference in Sumatra.

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of Islam in the Indies.64 Similarly, Karel Steenbrink posited that some officials exploited Dutch fears of Islam in the region as a means to gain additional funding for military ventures.65 The move to subjugate Aceh once and for all, then, could be interpreted as a Dutch pre-emptive strike against an Islamic stronghold on the periphery of the Indies. The expansion of colonial borders in this paradigm was a (not unwelcome) derivative of the campaign to impose secular rule on Islamic landscapes.

By the advent of the Aceh War, which began in 1873 and did not come to a formal close until 1903,66 it was no longer possible for colonists to erase Islam from landscapes that hosted anti-colonial resistance. Much of the conflict was characterised, in both Acehnese and Dutch accounts, as a religious war.67 From the mid-1880s, Islamic leaders occupied an important place in the fight against the Dutch.68 Much of the guerrilla resistance involved ulamas, who considered themselves to be fighting a holy war against unbelievers.69 The Dutch therefore located their allies among secular elites, the ulèëbalang (local rulers), whom the colonists hoped to absorb into the machinery of government as they had the bupatis of Java.70 This alliance, which ultimately brought formal Dutch victory, had been recommended by Snouck Hurgronje, who predicted the intransigence of Aceh’s ulamas.71 Indeed, many Acehnese never accepted defeat,72 and the strength of their resistance against

64 Laffan (2000): 79, 81. 65 Steenbrink: 82. 66 Following the dates given by Anthony Reid (2005): 339, although these are contentious. Michael Laffan has recently dated the end of the war around 1910 — Laffan (2003): 39. Indeed, Reid (2005): 339–40, acknowledges that fighting continued until 1914 in the Gayo region, and in the south throughout the 1920s. Four thousand colonial troops remained stationed in Aceh until the onset of the Japanese occupation. 67 The Aceh War is also characterised thus by historians today: Michael Laffan has termed the Aceh War the ‘most protracted jihad of the nineteenth century’ — Laffan (2003): 39. There was also written support for the Acehnese from Javanese and Arab hajis living in Singapore, who urged Javanese rulers to join the jihad and to expect Turkish military support (which never came) — Reid (2005): 239, 240. 68 Reid (2005): 14. 69 Ricklefs (2001): 187. 70 Ricklefs (2001): 188. 71 Brown (2003): 101. 72 Ricklefs (2001): 189; Brown (2003): 212.

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colonial expansion seems to have haunted colonists long after the formal end to the conflict. Aceh was the only region that the Dutch did not attempt to reconquer when the Japanese were expelled from the Indies at the close of the Pacific War.73

Images from the early years of the Aceh War indicate that the Dutch in the Netherlands were greedy for information on the progress of the conflict.74 More significantly, even hand-drawn images suggested a fundamental change in colonial perceptions of the nature of this war relative to its antecedents in other parts of the Indies. Gone were the remote, triumphant views associated with De Stuers’ images of the Java War. The comfortable distance between viewer and subject was closed, the enemy was often clearly identified as Islamic, and the landscape remained intransigently hostile to Dutch forces. A lithograph of a skirmish between Dutch and Acehnese forces, published in 1875 [Plate 8], shows the fighting up close, chaotic and, more importantly, evenly matched. The enemy — the Muslim Acehnese fighter — is distinguished by his white, vaguely Arab costume for the benefit of Dutch audiences. Colonial forces stand their ground in jungle-combat gear against a forested backdrop. The defining features of the Aceh War were thus summarised. The enemy openly defined his actions (in this case, by costume) in terms of jihad — holy war in defence of Islamic lands. In Aceh, these were all the more treacherous for colonists in that, in the later stages of the conflict, much of the fighting occurred in dense, largely unchartered jungles, often in the form of guerrilla campaigns.75 Rob Nieuwenhuys, who included photographs from the Aceh War in his Met Vreemde Ogen, characterised this landscape as a ‘dark green, continuously stifling and dark primaeval forest [oerbos]’.76

Twenty-first century audiences are now almost inured against images of the landscapes that play host to conflict. However, photography had not existed in early colonial wars like the

73 Ricklefs (2001): 189. 74 Lithographs appeared, for example, in De Oorlog met Acin, Beschreven en Afgebeeld voor het Nederlandsche Volk (The War with Aceh, Described and Depicted for the Dutch People), published in the Netherlands in 1875. The title suggests an informative intent. See Bastin and Brommer: 295. 75 Ricklefs (2001): 187. Resistance against the Dutch after they had taken in 1874 emanated from the surrounding highlands. 76 Rob Nieuwenhuys, Met Vreemde Ogen (Amsterdam, 1988): 155.

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one in Java. In the late nineteenth century, therefore, Dutch audiences must have been deeply shocked by what they saw of the Aceh War. The result of one Dutch-led punitive expedition into rebel hinterlands furnished a grisly photographic record. The mission, undertaken over a period of five months in 1904, resulted in the deaths of nearly 3000 men, women and children — up to a third of the population of the sparsely peopled Gayo and Alas regions.77 A photograph from the expedition shows a razed landscape bordered on one side by KNIL soldiers who look upon their handiwork: damaged buildings and a ground littered with bodies [Plate 9]. These were landscapes destroyed and desecrated, the dead buried in mass graves rather than given the rites they would have otherwise expected.78

Long casualty lists79 together with horrifying images and accounts of the war often affected writers who, by the late colonial period, demonstrated a deep suspicion of Islam in the Indies. In mid-nineteenth century colonial literature, Islam barely registered as a source of Dutch concern. In Max Havelaar (1860), Multatuli depicted as his hero’s enemy a bupati tarnished mainly by the commonplace corruptions of greed and vanity. Fifty years later, in The Hidden Force (1900), Louis Couperus pitted his Dutch protagonist against a much more treacherous enemy: a malignant Javanese ruler motivated by religious zealotry. To Couperus’ doomed protagonist, Otto van Oudijck, his nemesis Sunario seemed ‘unreal, not an official, not a regent, merely a fanatical Javanese who always shrouded himself in secrets’.80 And yet, it was Sunario’s manipulation of the ‘hidden forces’ of nature (powers associated in the novel with Javanese mysticism), together with his role as a Muslim leader, that orchestrated Van Oudijck’s demise.

Couperus’ depiction of Sunario’s outward obeisance toward and inner resentment of his

77 Nieuwenhuys (1988): 161. 78 Nieuwenhuys (1988): 161. 79 Scholarly estimates of casualties differ. Anthony Reid provides varying figures on Dutch casualties, which range between 10,000 and 16,000 in his work — Reid (2005): 14, 267, 339. Reid’s estimate of Acehnese deaths over a period of 40 years ranges between 50,000 and 100,000: 14, 267. Colin Brown, on the other hand, posits that 15,000 KNIL soldiers and 25,000 Acehnese died — Brown (2003): 99. 80 ‘Maar Sunario vond hij oneigenlijk, geen ambtenaar, geen Regent, alleen maar een fanatieke Javaan, die zich hulde in iets van geheim … ’ — Louis Couperus, De Stille Kracht (Utrecht and Antwerp, 1982): 31–2.

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Dutch overlords was a clear expression of late colonial fears about the insidious, seditious effect of Islamic elites on their apparently pliant followers. The mysterious recurring figure of the haji (person who has completed the pilgrimage to Mecca, or the haj) in The Hidden Force serves as a religiously authoritative counterpoint to Dutch concerns over the secular influence of pious bupatis like Sunario. In Chapter 13 of the novel — the climactic point at which Leonie van Oudijck decides to seduce Addy de Luce, and therefore completes the betrayal of all her family — Leonie’s Javanese maid Urip glimpses a ghostly haji in the garden: a sign, perhaps, that the local Islamic community was monitoring the immoral behaviours of Dutch ruling families. The haji reappears at the end of the novel, when Van Oudijck is undone and his friend bids him fairwell before her departure for Europe. A large group of hajis just returned from Mecca mill about the train station. They attract a crowd of faithful admirers. Van Oudijck and his friend feel outnumbered, excluded and insecure among the throng of Muslims:

… they felt It, That — both of them — both together this time, in the midst of this fanatical multitude ... And in feeling it, together with the sadness of their parting, which pressed immediately upon them, they did not see amid the waving, heaving, buzzing multitude who reverently hustled the yellow and purple dignity of the hajis returned from Mecca; they did not see the one, great white haji rising above the crowd and peering with a grin at the man who, regardless of how he had lived his life in Java, had been weaker than That ...81

By which, presumably, Couperus meant to indicate that the authority of European, (nominally) Christian men like Van Oudijck could never hope to compete with the influence — however ill-founded, in Dutch eyes — of indigenous Islamic leaders.

In Madelon Lulofs’ work, which concentrated on Sumatra, commoner Muslims in the form of Javanese immigrant labour were the focus of her attention. Lulofs spent part of her

81 ‘Dat zij Hét, Dát, voelden — beiden — beiden tegelijkertijd nu, daar te midden van het dwepen dier menigte … ‘En in het voelen ervan, tegelijk met de weemoed van hun afscheid, dat zo dadelijk dreigde, zagen ze niet, te midden der golvende, deinende, gonzende meigte, die als eerbiediglijk voorstuwde de gele en purperen voornaamheden der uit Mekka terugkerende hadji’s — zagen zij niet die éne grote witte, rijzen boven de menigte uit en kijken met zijn grijnslach naar de man, die hoe hij ook zijn leven geademd had in Java, zwakker geweest dan Dát … ’ — Couperus (1982): 206.

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childhood at a military outpost in Aceh during the war82 and, rather unusually, developed a keen interest in controversial aspects of the conflict. One of her novels, Tjoet Nja Din (1948),83 recounted the life of the eponymous Acehnese warrior-widow.84 Another, De Hongertocht (Journey of Famine) (1936), covered an ill-fated and notorious Dutch expedition into the wild Acehnese hinterland that resulted in the deaths of many soldiers.85 Lulofs’ novels on the plantation system did not address the Aceh War, confining their contents to the boom and bust years in rubber production of the 1920s. However, her observations on the faith of Javanese coolies provide an insight into the colonial perception of Islam as a religion that inspired mindless submission, even fatalism, among its adherents. Indeed, the subheading to the English version of Coolie read ‘If Allah has ordained it thus …’,86 and throughout the novel Lulofs implied that it was the slavish capitulation of individual will to Islam exhibitied by ordinary Javanese that was indirectly to blame for their suffering in Sumatra.87

This judgment of course ignored the role of colonial exploitation in recruiting and indenturing those Javanese who worked on Sumatran estates. It also sat uneasily alongside historical Dutch responses to Indies Muslims excercising their powers of agency and revolting against tyranny. By the early twentieth century, government moves to monitor Islamic activity in the Indies had become more purposeful, particularly once religiosity had became associated with some sections of the fledgling nationalist movement. In 1913, when

82 Rob Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies: A History of Dutch Colonial Literature (Amherst, 1982): 173. 83 The modern spelling, as Reid points out, would be Cut Nyak Dien. She lived between 1848 and 1908 — Reid (2005): 336. 84 Nieuwenhuys (1982): 175. 85 Niuewenhuys (1982): 173–4. 86 The original Dutch version, interestingly, does not bear this subtitle. 87 When Ruki, Lulofs’ protagonist, is separated from Karminah, whom he has elected to protect by nominating her as his wife, Lulofs narrates: ‘With fatalistic resignation he thought: “What can I do? The other man is stronger, has power! He can shout and strike! I am only orang-kontrak. It was fate, nassip, that Allah had sent.’ (En fatalistische dacht hij: “Wat kon hij er aan doen? De ander was sterker, had de macht! Die mócht schreeuwen en slaan! … Hij was nu een orang-kontrak … Het noodlot, nassip, dat Allah hem zond …”) — Lulofs, (1932): 38. Whenever Ruki and his fellows question their circumstances, they always arrive at similar conclusions — Lulofs (1932): 44, 116, 188.

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a branch of Sarekat Islam opened in the Batavian suburb of Meester Cornelis, officials vigilantly noted the local increase in mosque attendance.88 It was in this period that official concerns about the increase in Hadrami Arab immigration to Batavia became more vigorous. By 1930 more than 6000 Arabs populated the colonial capital, many of them adherents to Wahhabi forms of Islam.89 In 1905, there had been 29,000 people of Arab descent counted in the whole Indies, many concentrated in large cities.90 The changing nature and wide appeal of Islam in the region worried Dutch policy-makers, who sought to contain it to those islands where Islam was already established. In the 1920s and 1930s, for example, officials were working to keep Hindu Bali and the semi-Christianised eastern islands of the Indies apart from Java and the other Muslim islands to the west and north.91 The containment of Islamic landscapes that threatened to overwhelm colonial notions of a peaceful, exotic Indies was both official policy as well as cultural ideal.

F G

Tropical nature suited the Dutch colonial ideal that Asian religions were ancient, mystical and exotic. It provided a fitting context for antique ruins and an inspiring setting for artistic fantasies. Hindu and Buddhist monuments like Borobudur and Prambanan in Central Java seemed to combine opportunity to indulge an intriguing combination of creative contemplation and scientific inquiry for European observers. Colonists placed themselves, particularly their agency in discovering and restoring these sites, at the centre of visual narratives about antique sacred landscapes. In doing so, their actions and reflections often

88 Susan Abeyasekere, Jakarta: A History (Singapore, 1987): 57, 104–5. 89 Abeyasekere: 109. Wahhabism was a puritan form of Islam with Arabian origins. Its name stems from the leader of a revivalist movement that advocated a return to sharia, Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703-92). In the Indies, Wahhabism often assumed militant forms — see Giora Eliraz, Islam in Indonesia: Modernism, Radicalism, and the Middle East Dimension (Brighton and Portland, 2004): 38, 45, 57. 90 Reid (2005): 230–1. 91 Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca and London, 1995): 38-40. Part of the reason for this was also to cordon the eastern islands off from the nationalist movements that flourished to the west.

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contradicted indigenous notions of the sacred. On Bali, artists also misconstrued the meaning and function of religious sites. In their fervour to understand and depict a living variant of Hinduism, some European painters inadvertantly romanticised, even Christianised, religious practice on Bali in their works.

Colonial artists threw a sharper, less idealistic eye across the Islamic landscapes of the Indies. Their views of mosques and grave sites were ostensibly neutral, but unlike the French and British Orientalist artists who depicted the Middle East and North Africa, Dutch artists seemed to find little to fantasise about in the Islamic landscapes of the Indies. By the late nineteenth century, especially after the onset of the Aceh War, the explicit association between Islam and politics among Dutch officials and scholars was also affecting visual and literary depictions of Muslim spaces in colonial art and culture. Although natural landscapes were recorded appreciatively by some Dutch artists in Aceh, the view of the region that came to dominate in European accounts was one characterised by concerns over militant Islam. This trend represented a significant break with the past. In 1830, the Diponegoro War had been represented as a fleeting conflict that left no permanent mark on the landscapes of Central Java. Four decades later, in the context of changing technologies and regional politics, it was no longer possible to expunge Islam from representations of a war-torn Sumatran landscape. Not only had photography changed the way that conflict was represented, but the colonial fear of militant Islam had been linked to pan-Islamic and nationalist movements. Muslim landscapes became inimical, in colonial minds, to the idealised contours of religious space that had been constructed around contemporary and historical Hinduism. It was ancient and living Hindu landscapes that played a crucial role in defining the exotic, benign and seemingly apolitical character of those sacred spaces that were preferred by Dutch colonists in the Indies.

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F Part III G

Anxieties

F Chapter 6 G

Seductions

As much as European art from the Indies reflected the practical ideals of rust en orde, it also expressed the seductive allure that captivated colonists residing in tropical landscapes. Colonial cultures often located their most fantastic notions of the exotic in the women of the ‘East’, who encapsulated both the pleasures and the dangers of acclimatisation to a foreign environment. For European painters and photographers in the Netherlands Indies, Asian commoner women were strongly associated with the languid, sensual landscapes of the tropics. In this sense Dutch artists differed fundamentally from French or British Orientalists, who often associated the eroticism of non-western women with the interior recesses of tantalisingly private domestic spaces. In the Netherlands Indies, the candid visual ‘shot’ (employed by painters as well as photographers) of nude native women bathing in public became a cliché for the supposedly unsophisticated, ‘natural’ state of indigenous society — a world that European and upper class native women did not belong to. In colonial visual art, particularly from the latter half of the nineteenth century, the status and respectability of the latter class of women was usually maintained with clothing, for one thing, but also by placing such women within domestic and ‘civilised’ contexts. A respect for status, then, informed colonial views of women in Indies landscapes.

It was when indigenous women and tropical landscapes subverted the clear social boundaries that colonists ascribed to that anxieties over the maintenance of European spaces and respectable moral behaviours began to manifest. Asian women often inhabited European interior spaces, and colonists could not avoid being surrounded by larger indigenous landscapes. This perpetual intrusion of native elements into both the public and private worlds of colonists was alternately an attraction and a source for concern. Further, colonists constructed far more complex associations between eroticism and landscape than those that were mediated by indigenous women alone. Indeed, in colonial literature Indies 6 – Seductions

landscapes assumed a surprisingly genderless, though clearly racialised, power to seduce and corrupt European morality. The sexualisation of native women, then, and their association in colonial minds with Indies landscapes was only one component of the more general sensualisation of the tropical environment by colonists. This perception often injected a contradictory current of fear and desire towards Indies landscapes into colonial writing. On the one hand, colonists clearly took advantage of the licentiousness that they believed to pervade Indies landscapes by engaging in acts of voyeurism and pursuing other, more direct, modes of indulging their passions. On the other hand, colonists also feared their morals to be under constant attack from the landscapes that enclosed them. This tension between longing and aversion, permissiveness and denial, often found curious expression in Dutch attitudes to landscapes that might ordinarily have been viewed as rather benign.

F Colonial images of women in tropical landscapes G

Indigenous women were a ubiquitous fixture in the landscapes of the Indies, and were correspondingly omnipresent in Dutch images of the tropics. In photographs, women filled landscapes in large numbers and diverse roles, often in guises that were differentiated by race and class. Seen through the lens of European photographers, the most prestigious group of women to people Indies landscapes were the Dutch, who were commonly portrayed in roles that emphasised their higher status relative to most native women and their subordination to European men. The privileges of leisure and mobility were among the most salient aspects of advantage that European status bestowed upon Dutch women in the Indies. Photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show Dutch women as automobile and train passengers, cyclists and ocean travellers,1 as well as participants in pleasure excursions to tourist spots like beaches, waterfalls and mountain resorts.2 Such images indicated that Dutch women were free to move through (and beyond) Indies landscapes in ways that few other classes of Indies women were able to pursue.

1 See Rob Nieuwenhuys, Baren en Oudgasten (Amsterdam, 1998): 28, 123, 136. 2 Nieuwenhuys (1998): 132–4.

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Upon closer inspection, however, late colonial photographs also suggest that the movements of Dutch women were determined by the strictures of respectability. Women travellers were usually shown accompanied by men, particularly on long journeys or through dangerous regions.3 European men, on the other hand, appeared in photographs in various intrepid, exclusively male manifestations — as explorers, scientists, and hunters, for example — that emphasised their authoritative freedom within Indies landscapes.4 Photographs from the late colonial period suggest that even though Dutch women were able to travel further and more frequently through Indies landscapes than the majority of their Asian counterparts, the most familiar places to them remained those seen from their verandah or garden. This was the place in which Dutch women were most often photographed, usually with their family and servants around them. A photograph of the Holle-Van der Hucht women provides a case in point, showing them ensconsed on the expansive porch of their neoclassical house, shaded by its blinds, well within the confines of the grounds [Plate 1]. The dominant colonial image of European women, then, was as inhabitants of highly localised landscapes and guardians of domestic spaces. The position of Dutch women in Indies landscapes was a reflection of their place in elite colonial society: as verandah-dwelling family women, privileged but confined to socially reproductive, ‘inside’ roles.5

3 See Nieuwenhuys (1998): 118. 4 See Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk, Het Indië Boek (Zwolle, 2001), which includes photographs of European men in the following guises: a natural scientist pursuing butterflies in the wild (p 14); an intrepid- looking JC Koningsberger on expedition (p 17); one Professor Busgen exploring for plants (p 18); and a hunter who has set his topi upon a felled Sumatran elephant (p 184). There are far fewer, if any, photographs of colonial women in similar poses and occupations, both in this particular collection and elsewhere. 5 There are many photographs of European women in colonial clubs with their menfolk, but the important thing to emphasise is that they are rarely seen out of male company in public places. The work of Ann Laura Stoler generally confirms that European women occupied subordinate positions in colonial society, that they (together with European children) were under more or less constant surveillance, even in the home, and that their segregation from indigenous women was upheld wherever possible — see Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Making empire respectable: The politics of race and sexual morality in 20th century colonial cultures’ in Jan Breman (ed), Imperial Monkey Business: Racial Supremacy in Social Darwinist Theory and Colonial Practice (Amsterdam, 1990): 35, 45, 48.

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This Dutch women shared in common with their elite Javanese counterparts, who were frequently portrayed from the late nineteenth century onwards in portraits that emphasised their function as progenitors of aristocratic dynasties. In addition, since commissioned photographs were still costly in the late nineteenth century,6 notable Indonesian (and Chinese) women who sat for such portraits were also signalling their membership of an affluent social class that considered itself a patron of the arts, and educated in technological developments like photography. Indeed, photo-portraits of elite Javanese women often communicated the authority and respect that they commanded.7 The fine costumes, dignified postures and regal glare with which many of these women returned the camera’s gaze8 suggest that they were as determined to have their rank and power commemorated as their male counterparts, both Asian and European.

Significantly, high-ranking Javanese women were rarely photographed out of doors. They were associated instead with the civilised, domestic space that behoved their aristocratic status. Indeed, as upper-class Muslims they would not have been allowed to venture far beyond the confines of their domestic quarters without an escort. Women formed an important component of official processions and special occasions in royal courts, but it would certainly have been considered beneath them to be seen unaccompanied on public modes of transport like trains or trams.9

Elite Javanese women, then, were perhaps even more distantly associated with Indies

6 Anneke Groeneveld, ‘Photography in aid of science’ in Toekang Portret: 100 Years of Photography in the Dutch East Indies 1839–1939 (Amsterdam, 1989): 108. Steve Wachlin, Woodbury & Page, Photographers: Java (Leiden, 1994): 13. 7 Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities (London and New York, 2000): 13. 8 See the images of elite Javanese women in Rob Nieuwenhuys’ Met Vreemde Ogen — 17–18, 29, 32–3, 35, 38, 41–2, 50–5, 90–1, and Ch 6 ( and her family). 9 There are few (if any) images of elite Javanese women on trains. Rudolph Mrázek, in Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton and Oxford, 2002): 11, suggests that trains were generally less popular among upper class Javanese.

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landscapes in colonial minds than Dutch women were.10 Rather, colonial photographs, together with paintings and literature, suggest that it was ordinary indigenous women from the lower classes who left their mark on Dutch images of Indies landscapes, for the outdoors was the domain of commoner (particularly rural) women who had to work in order to have their needs provided for.11 Commoner women, as we saw in Chapter 4, laboured in rice fields and on plantations, commanded market stalls, and jostled on streets and river banks. Like their male counterparts, commoner women were also the subject of photographic explorations into ‘ethnic types’ that blurred the boundaries between scholarly anthropology and souvenir tourism.12

Unlike their male fellows, however13 (not to mention elite European and Asian women),

10 This makes for an interesting contrast to Maria Dermoût’s depiction of Suprapto’s memory of his regal foster mother in ‘The Professor’ (The Ten Thousand Things), where the mother is associated with the mountains of Central Java. I discuss this issue further in Chapter 7. 11 Certainly on Java, peasant women tended to work outside the home and to be financially autonomous. They were therefore important to rural households for their labour contribution. Europeans recognised peasant households as units of production, as opposed to upper class Javanese households, which were associated in colonial minds with social reproduction. More generally, policy-makers tended to view peasant women differently from their elite counterparts: the former were more likely to be considered as ‘other’ by Europeans than the latter — see Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘Colonial ambivalencies: European attitudes towards the Javanese household (1900–1942)’ in Juliette Koning, Marleen Nolten, Janet Rodenburg and Ratna Saptari (eds), Women and Households in Indonesia: Cultural Notions and Social Patterns (Richmond, 2000): 30, 33-4. 12 See Boomgaard and Van Dijk (2001) for good examples of photographic ‘ethnic types’ who were often asked to pose within a studio surrounded by the accoutrements with which they were associated — Chinese and Javanese street vendors (pp 92–3); a native teacher, student and servant (p 175); Minangkabau and Karo Batak women in adat costuum (traditional garb) (pp 236–7); a Dayak in war regalia (p 344); and a Minahasa ‘priest’ or holy man (p 399). Such images also appeared in popular travelogues, such as Augusta de Wit’s Java: Facts and Fancies (Singapore, 1989) [First published 1912] — this included, for example, a studio portrait of native street vendors (p 17) and a tableau of native servants (p 69), among other images. On the use of photography in ethnography and colonial popular culture, see more generally Maxwell (2000): 9, 14. 13 There are no studies, as far as I am aware, that discuss the representation of homosexuality, or homoerotica, in colonial Indonesia, except perhaps Robert Aldrich’s recent Homosexuality and Colonialism (London and New York, 2003). Aldrich discusses well known figures like Walter Spies and Louis Couperus in a comparative context. For homosexuality and trans-gender culture in contemporary Indonesia, Dédé Oetomo’s

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commoner women were also subject to the more probing gaze of photographers and painters in pursuit of erotic images. Pornographic photographs of native women (usually prostitutes) were intended for the consumption of ostensibly respectable male European clients who purchased such images, often discretely concealed within a paper sheath, as components of souvenir albums of the Indies.14 Some of these images suggest that photographers did not always rely upon the enthusiastic consent of the models they chose. The expressions of indifference, fear and aversion that mark their faces are among the most striking features of these pictures.15 The simple intent of these photographs is also suggested by the fact that few accoutrements competed for attention with the models themselves. Surroundings were often starkly propless, emphasising the complete focus of the camera on the figure.16

Rarely did photographers explore the painterly inclination, which we will come to below, toward obscuring bald titillation at the sight of nude native women with scholarly references to classicism or fertility, possibly because practical issues — a reluctant model, or the fear of interruption or discovery — prevented them from experimenting overmuch with symbolic associations. An exception, perhaps, presents itself in the lesser-known photographic work of Walter Spies on Bali, undertaken during the 1930s in collaboration with Beryl de Zoete, an eccentric and talented dance specialist and scholar. Spies took a candid but artful approach to his nude subjects. His three Balinese women bathing were photographed discretely from above so that only their bare top halves could be seen, while their nether regions remained modestly obscured beneath the water.17 Spies was less

‘Gender and sexual orientation in Indonesia’ in Laurie J Sears (ed), Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia (Durham and London, 1996), is enlightening. 14 Nieuwenhuys (1998): 109–10; Groeneveld: 87. 15 Nieuwenhuys (1998): 109. However, there are also a couple of images in the same volume that show women with cheeky, if not defiant, expressions on their faces — See pp 114–5. 16 Again, see the images in Rob Nieuwenhuys (1998), in the chapter entitled ‘Dienaressen van Venus’ (Servants of Venus), and the image of a Sundanese prostitute in Toekang Portret: 100 Years of Photography in the Dutch East Indies 1839–1939 (Amsterdam, 1989): 79. 17 In Michael Hitchcock and Lucy Norris, Bali: The Imaginary Museum. The Photographs of Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete (Oxford, 1995): plate 83.

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discreet in an accompanying image of boys bathing on the other side of the pool [Plate 2]. The youths were photographed at eye level and completely naked18 — a striking example of homoeroticism in colonial imagery from the Indies. Indeed, Spies’ proclivities were well-known on Bali (see Chapter 5). Even in his photographs, however, Spies was unable to curb his artistic inclinations. Some of them show an assistant standing by with a white sheet to control the distribution of light, a concern that often manifested in Spies’ dramatic use of light in his paintings.19

It was the immediacy of the colonial photographer’s presence in the image-making process that heightened the sense of voyeurism implicit in some representations of women in Indies landscapes. Photographers physically intruded into private (and public) spaces and elicited responses from their subjects that demonstrated how invasive their camera-pointing could be. Images of Asian women washing and bathing in streams and river shallows provide a case in point. A photograph of women bathing in Batavia’s Molenvliet, in Nieuwenhuys’ Met Vreemde Ogen,20 illustrates how the camera was able to ‘capture’ an image of women going about their business — washing clothes, some partly submerged, others squatting on the canal’s banks — perhaps oblivious to the intrusion that was about to be visited upon them. The photograph was taken from an elevated and slightly askew perspective, quite close and cropped, which gives the impression of a hurriedly aimed apparatus thrust into a throng of women. A similar photograph in Boomgaard and Van Dijk’s recent Het Indië Boek, taken around 1910, shows the startled and slightly angry expressions on the faces of the women interrupted at their task [Plate 3].

Dutch visitors to the Indies often expressed their fascination upon observing what was considered in Europe to be a private affair. The Dutch travel writer Augusta de Wit held that ‘[o]ne of the most fascinating scenes is that of the bath in the river, soon after sunrise’.21 De Wit observed that such practices among the ‘Malays’ (as she uniformly

18 In Hitchcock and Norris: plate 84. 19 See photographs in Hitchcock and Norris. 20 Rob Niewenhuys, Met Vreemde Ogen (Amsterdam, 1988): 137. 21 De Wit: 99.

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referred to the Asians of Batavia) might seem ‘strange to us Northerners’, but that it was perfectly natural for natives ‘to live in this manner.’22 Indeed, De Wit could barely refrain from partaking of the colonial penchant for voyeurism. She included in her book a photograph of ‘A laundry in the river’, showing three partly submerged women glancing warily at the photographer,23 and made the following admiring comment on the young girls whom she observed at Tanah Abang:

… [they are] making believe to bathe, as they empty little buckets made of palm leaf, over each other’s head and shoulders, until their black hair shines, and the running water draws their garments into flowers, clinging folds, that mould their lithe little figures from bosom to ankle.24

That indigenous women bathed in public seemed, to some Europeans, to invite observation. Indeed, the tone of vicariousness that pervades many colonial images of bathing native women suggests that titillation was a crucial part of the experience of looking.

Little consideration seems to have been given to the fact that indigenous women may have retained a certain expectation of privacy from one another and from bystanders because they bathed in the open. The violation of their privacy by prying colonial eyes is most frequently demonstrated in photographs, where the response of people taken unawares is difficult for the photographer to control. In colonial contexts, the power of the European photographer to invade the privacy (and subvert the dignity) of colonial subjects has left a legacy of extraordinary photographs where the resistance of native subjects can occasionally be discerned in defiant or outraged expressions, much like those of the women in Plate 3.

Photographers were not the only observers who stopped to watch native women bathing publicly. Indeed, this preoccupation represented one of the most distinctive associations between native women and Indies landscapes in European art. Painterly images of bathing scenes were more deliberately constructed, consciously artful representations than those of

22 De Wit: 98. 23 De Wit: 100. 24 De Wit: 99.

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their photographer counterparts. Painters did not need to physically intrude (at least, not for long) on their subject’s awareness in order to create images. They had the luxury of composing at their own leisure, from imagination or surreptitious observation — it is perhaps no coincidence that paintings of Indies women bathing were often viewed as though from a distance, such as in the work of Maurits van den Kerkhoff (1830–1908), for instance.25 Painters rarely showed the awkward moments of bathing. Clumsy scrubbing and convoluted postures were absent from their work. Instead, figures were usually shown in leisurely, graceful poses that flattered and accentuated the figure.26 Painters also tended to intersperse their images with classical references that dignified their voyeurism and indulged the ideal of the private communion between native women and Indies landscapes. Abraham Salm’s De Badplaats Wenditt (The Bathing Spot at Wenditt) provides a case in point [Plate 4]. Salm’s conservative inclinations prevented him from depicting naked women without embellishing their image with the standard tools of nineteenth century official art27 — hence Salm’s improbable predilection, in this instance, for Grecian robes and academic poses. The painting, situated at a popular lakeside resort near Malang in East Java, includes a curious melange of tropical and classical markers. Palm trees and thatched huts crowd the banks of a lake that is littered with native women in various states of undress, some in flowing robes and contrived postures that would perhaps have been better suited to an Italianate pastoral landscape.28

The Bali artists of the early twentieth century largely dispensed with such studious

25 See examples in Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics (Amsterdam, 1999) — View of the near Malang (East Java) (p 82) and The Brantas River and the Semeru Volcano near Malang (East Java) (p 83). 26 This was especially the case in colonial art from Bali. See, for example, the flattering bathing scenes by the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias in Adriana Williams and Yu-Chee Chong, Covarrubias in Bali (Singapore, 2005). See also the works of Adrien le Mayeur in Ruud Spruit, Artists on Bali (Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur, 1997). 27 Martha MacIntyre and Maureen Mackenzie, ‘Focal length as an analogue of cultural distance’ in Elizabeth Edwards (ed), Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920 (New Haven and London, 1992): 162. The classical pose and costume were also used in some ethnographic photography. 28 See comments made by Hamblyn and Chong: 60.

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pretentions, freely indulging the partiality toward images of bare-breasted Balinese women that gripped many European observers in the 1920s and 1930s.29 Perhaps the most prolific producer of idyllic, semi-erotic scenes was Adrien le Mayeur, the Belgian artist based at Sanur beach. Le Mayeur is today perhaps not among the best known of the Bali artists, possibly because his skills were not so well developed as the rather flattering reproductions of his paintings in books often suggest. As they hang on the walls of his former house, now a museum, Le Mayeur’s works show paint applied rather more thickly and in brighter (almost fluorescent) hues than the delicate, subdued shades that characterise print versions of his paintings.30 To his credit, however, and in contradistinction to most other Bali artists, Le Mayeur’s paintings were studies in movement and vibrant colour: his figures, glimpsed (enticingly) through a veil of riotous vegetation, seem always to be in mid-motion. These figures were always women, often bare-breasted or completely naked and positioned around or within a pool, as in Bathing in the Garden [Plate 5],31 Five Women at a Lotus Pond,32 and Four Girls at a Lotus Pond.33

The exotic cluster of scantily-clad women gamboling among pools and flowers was Le Mayeur’s domestic life and also his fantasy, for it excluded everything beyond his garden wall, such as more diverse kinds of Balinese women (and Balinese men, who are invisible in his work), not to mention economic hardship and war (see Chapter 5). Some indigenous artists took exception to such privileged fantasies. The nationalist painter S Soedjojono, who opposed the nostalgic mooi Indië style of painting, wrote in 1939 that Indonesians should reject such depictions of their country, especially images of lush landscapes featuring ‘half-naked women’.34

The eroticisation of indigenous women at the hands of colonial artists was, of course, not

29 Adrian Vickers, Bali: A Paradise Created (Singapore, 1996): 77, 87. This book also includes a tourist postcard of two rather stiffly posing women, characterised as inhabitants of ‘the island of bare breasts’: 149. 30 Some are almost pastel in print — see On the Beach in Spruit (1997): 106. 31 Spruit (1997): 103. 32 Spruit (1997): 102. 33 Spruit (1997): 104–5. 34 Mrázek: 37.

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restricted to those Europeans painting in the Netherlands Indies. The French and British Orientalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made an art form, quite literally, of projecting their own fantasies of the exotic and the sensual onto the women of the Middle East and North Africa. It is important to distinguish between these artists, however, and between the qualitatively different themes that inspired European painters in the Indies. While both groups of artists employed voyeuristic perspectives in their works, only the Indies artists spied upon their subjects out doors and explicitly associated tropical nature with female sensuality. The Orientalists commonly located their erotic fantasies indoors, in keeping with the requirements of the hot, arid and often urban landscapes through which they passed, and with deference to the fact that Muslim women in the Middle East and North Africa were more often obscured from Western view — both by their clothing and through the segregation of public and private spaces — than Indonesian women of the same period were likely to be.35 The harem fantasies of Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) were famously viewed through doors and even keyhole frames [Plate 6],36 the object being to reveal — at least with the mind’s eye — the enticing rooms that were, in reality, concealed from most European men.37 The domestic interior, then, was the site of the Orientalist fetish.

35 In the early twentieth century, the issue of women wearing veils (the jilbab or hijab) was still controversial among Muslims in the Netherlands Indies. Some thought it a foreign, Arab custom, and most Indies women went unveiled — see Kees van Dijk, ‘Sarongs, jubbahs, and trousers: Appearance as a means of distinction and discrimination’ in Henk Schulte-Nordholt (ed), Outward Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia (Leiden, 1997): 65. In the same book, see Jean Gelman Taylor, ‘Costume and gender in colonial Java, 1800–1940’: 107–8, where she notes that ordinary Javanese Muslim women certainly covered their bodies with long sleeves and high necklines, but she presents no evidence to suggest that veiling was widespread. Elite Javanese women usually wore variants of traditional and western costume, and only wore clothes (including headcoverings) associated with the Islamic Middle East on special occasions in the Muslim calendar. Veiling was only widely adopted in Indonesia from the 1980s, as part of the resurgence of Islamism in the region — see Theodore Friend, Indonesian Destinies (Cambridge and London, 2003): 600. 36 See Head of the Grand Odalisque (c 1814–18), which is framed within a tondo, as is The Turkish Bath (1862). See also The Grande Odalisque (1814) and Odalisque with Slave (1839), all in Roger Benjamin, Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee (Sydney, 1997): 67, 70, 68, and 69 respectively. 37 In ‘The Oriental mirage’ in Orientalism (1997): 15, Roger Benjamin comments that few European artists would have seen a harem at first hand.

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In the Netherlands Indies, Muslim women were only beginning to cover more parts of their body from the second half of the nineteenth century, and the jilbab or headscarf was rarely seen in photographs before the twentieth century.38 On Hindu Bali, women indeed went about bare-breasted at the onset of Dutch rule, but not for long. Within several decades of colonisation, European mores had begun to prevail and a clothed torso became respectable attire for Balinese women.39 The humidity and natural exuberance of the tropics perhaps encouraged a more outdoor existence than was possible for people of the classical Orient.40 Certainly, Indonesian architecture, including mosques, is generally more open to the elements, with the pendopo (pavilion) structure finding favour throughout the archipelago.41 European artists in the Indies, then, encountered very different landscapes and contexts in which to imagine indigenous women compared to their French and British counterparts in the Orient. In the Indies, it was nature that seemed to conjure erotic opportunity in the minds of European artists, and the tropical lansdcape rather than the private interior that was most strongly associated with female sensuality.

38 While covering the body was a value shared by the women of most foreign ethnic communities on Java, for instance (certainly the Europeans, Arabs and Chinese), Jean Gelman Taylor suggests that the head scarf was not widely adopted by indigenous Muslim women until perhaps the mid-twentieth century. Upper class Javanese women wore variants of traditional and western dress; and those women involved in nationalist and independence movements from the 1920s onward were photographed bare-headed. Even during Sukarno’s reign, the ideal dress for Indonesian women did not include the headscarf — Jean Gelman Taylor, ‘Official photography, costume and the Indonesian revolution’ in Jean Gelman Taylor (ed), Women Creating Indonesia: The First Fifty Years (Monash, 1997): 99, 100, 114, 117, 121. 39 Photographs of Balinese women reflect that, by the mid-twentieth century, a widespread shift from undress (of the upper body) to dress had occurred. 40 I use the term ‘Orient’ in the sense that Edward Said initially intended, who in turn followed the conventional geographical meaning of the word according to European scholars: it conventionally indicated the Middle East and North Africa, or ‘the Islamic Orient’ — Edward W Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, 1995): 74–5. 41 On the structure of Indonesian mosques (and the Hindu origins of Indonesian sacred architecture), see Hugh O’Neill, ‘Southeast Asia’ in Martin Frishman and Hasan-Uddin Khan (eds), The Mosque: History, Architectural Development and Regional Diversity (London, 1991): 225, 227, 228. O’Neill notes that the mosques constructed by colonists in the nineteenth century often followed European concepts of what such a building ‘ought’ to look like, namely, the mosques of British India and the Arab Middle East: 225.

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F Seductions within — Asian women in Dutch spaces G

The frequent European observation of public bathing among natives confirmed widespread colonial views that indigenous women lived in closer connection with nature and were more overtly sexual in their inclinations than their Dutch counterparts. Late nineteenth century European thought commonly positioned women closer to nature because of their susceptibility to biological rhythms.42 Certainly, it was widely held in the Indies that European women suffered from the heat and humidity more than their male counterparts. In the 1930s novel Rubber, by Madelon Lulofs, a young Dutchwoman’s arrival in Sumatra direct from the Netherlands elicits wistful admiration from the men on the plantation, who expect her beauty and vitality to eventually fade in the punishing climate.43 Permanent and uncharacteristic indolence or general apathy, particularly after a Dutch woman’s first pregnancy, were further deleterious effects believed to follow from long exposure to the tropics.44 Such conceptions of how Dutch women fared in Indies landscapes emphasised their desexualisation upon immersion in the tropics.

The sexuality of indigenous women, on the other hand, was believed to be heightened by

42 See, for example, Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth Century France (Manchester and New York, 1990): 147. Here Green discusses the feminisation of nature in nineteenth century France. 43 An older planter reflects upon the addition of a young Dutch woman to his social circle: ‘John appreciated her fresh gaiety; her sparkling joyfulness, none of which was exhausted or paralysed yet … And he was overcome by a feeling of pity as he thought how quickly that would be extinguished! She would become tired and languid under the pressure of the perpetual heat …’ (‘John genoot van haar frische blijheid; van haar tintelende vreugde, waarin nog niets was afgemat, nog niets was verlamd … En hij weerde een even opkomend gevoel van medelijden, als hij bedacht: hoe gáuw zou dat alles gedooft zijn! Moe en loom woorden onder den druk van de eeuwige hitte …’) — Madelon Lulofs, Rubber (Oxford, 1933): 63. 44 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham and London, 1995): 186.

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their environment.45 Dutch colonists considered native women in general to be sexually precocious compared to their European counterparts. Colonists held that ‘Malay’ women — a broadly defined category that included the women of Bali — had oversized sexual organs and were inclined toward promiscuity.46 Javanese women suffered similar censure, which often emanated from medical experts as well as more general observers, both of whom pointed to the effects of the sultry tropical climate on loosening sexual morals.47 Even Javanese priyayi (elite) households were not immune to European condemnation, as they were associated in colonial minds with polygamy, and with extensive families that led to strife and divisiveness.48 ‘To the newcomer, the Indies had an air of sexual licentiousness’, Jean Gelman Taylor has written. ‘Wealthy Indonesians were polygamous, poor Indonesians divorced and remarried, and Dutch men lived with Indonesian partners to whom they were not married and who they frequently replaced.’49 Practices like polygamy and arranged or child marriages reinforced the colonial belief that natives were more promiscuous than Europeans.50 In the former instance, it is worth noting, colonists appear to have seized upon a relatively infrequent living arrangement. Only wealthy Indonesians could afford to maintain more than one wife, and with some exceptions among the Javanese nobility, even fewer were able to maintain the four wives that were allowed under Islamic law.51

45 See for example Liesbeth Hesselink, ‘Prostitution — A necessary evil, particularly in the colonies: Views on prostitution in the Netherlands Indies’ in Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Anke Niehof (eds), Indonesian Women in Focus: Past and Present Notions (Leiden, 1987): 208. 46 Vickers (1996): 87–8. 47 Frances Gouda cites an example from 1936, where a female gynaecologist working in Yogyakarta judged the sexual morality of local girls to differ fundamentally from Dutch girls because of their sexual development. She found native girls to exhibit no sense of virtue or morals — Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942 (Amsterdam, 1995): 113. 48 Locher-Scholten (2000a): 37. 49 Jean Gelman Taylor, Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (New Haven and London, 2003): 284. 50 Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘Monogamous marriage and female citizenship in the Dutch East Indies, 1898-1938’ in Maria Grever and Fia Dienteren (eds), A Fatherland for Women (Amsterdam, 2000): 139 — In 1937 there was drafted opposition to end polygamy, divorce by repudiation, child and arranged marriage among women married to Indonesian men — it was withdrawn after widespread Islamic opposition. See also Hesselink: 213. 51 In 1920, 1.5% of Javanese men had more than one wife — Peter Boomgaard, Children of the Colonial

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It was concubinage and the mestizo children that it often produced, however, that represented arguably the worst infraction against Dutch notions of feminine respectability. The function of the nyai, or concubine, was temporary and specific, constructed around meeting a Dutchman’s sexual and housekeeping needs until such time as he could afford to maintain a European wife.52 Elite Indonesians were no less judgmental than their European counterparts toward this living arrangement. Priyayi Javanese, for instance, considered concubines and their children to be members of the lowest classes.53 On the other hand, Peter Boomgaard has pointed out that few Javanese elites intervened to prevent concubinage which, ironically, may have bolstered the colonial perception that natives were sexually permissive.54 Promiscuity was particularly associated with Eurasians.55 Presumably, the logic underlying such assumptions held that children born out of wedlock or beyond the bounds of ‘respectable’ union had somehow inherited the sexual wantonness of their parents.

Policies that targetted the family in the late colonial period suggest that the (ideal) western model of the family — racially homogenous, monogamous, and nucleic — comprised the colonial ideal, one that was increasingly peddled to urban indigenous elites.56 Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, the colonial government’s Advisor on Native and Arab Affairs between 1889 and 1907, was particularly keen to espouse the state model of the family among

State: Population Growth and Economic Development in Java, 1795–1880 (Amsterdam, 1989): 152. See also Locher-Scholten (2000b): 140. 52 Taylor (2003): 148; Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘The nyai in colonial Deli: A case of supposed mediation’ in Sita van Bemmelen, Madelon Djajadiningrat-Nieuwenhuis, Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Elly Touwen- Bouwsma (eds), Women and Mediation in Indonesia (Leiden, 1992): 274; See also Gouda (1995): 114. 53 Gouda (1995): 115. Interestingly, in the literature produced in the court of Pakubowono IX, rural women were portrayed as ‘easy’, and it was imagined that Dutch women lusted after Javanese men, particularly the Sultan — See Nancy K Florida, ‘Sex wars: Writing gender relations in nineteenth century Java’ in Laurie J Sears (ed), Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia (Durham and London, 1996): 219 and 213–14 respectively. 54 Boomgaard (1989): 159. 55 Gouda (1995): 112–13. 56 Locher-Scholten (2000b); Stoler (1995): 194.

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Javanese of the upper classes:57 an interesting position to take, given that Snouck Hurgronje himself, having converted to Islam in the course of his quest to better acquaint himself with it, duly acquired three wives of his own.58 Despite the colonial state’s increasing concern over families that deviated from the bourgeois European norm, particularly those that transgressed racial boundaries, mixed marriages remained relatively common in the Indies well into the early twentieth century. Frances Gouda has suggested that, in 1925, almost one third of Europeans still chose Eurasian or Native spouses; that, in 1940, this proportion was still around one fifth of the total European population; and that, in the 1930s, only around one third of legally defined Europeans had even been born in Europe. 59 Such circumstances must have heightened conservative fears that the pernicious influence of Asian women in private European lives was undermining the very foundations of respectable Dutch family life in the Indies. Indeed, it has been the prevalence of Asian elements — notably women, in the guise of servants, babus (nannies), nyais (concubines) and/or wives and mothers — in private European spaces that has stimulated the most discussion among scholars in recent decades,60 almost to the detriment of our understanding of the way in which indigenous elements in wider Indies landscapes were perceived and represented by Europeans. It is to this oversight that the following discussion attends.

57 Locher-Scholten (2000b): 141. 58 Karel Steenbrink, Dutch Colonialism and Indonesian Islam: Contact and Conflicts 1596–1950 (Amsterdam, 1993): 87–8. See also Michael F Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The ‘Umma’ Below the Winds (London and New York, 2003): 85. 59 Gouda (1995): 165. 60 Stoler (1995): 156–7. Stoler argues that Europeans believed the corrupting influence of native servants (or Eurasian children, or lower class Dutch children) would encourage the precocious development of white childrens’ sexuality. See also Ann Laura Stoler, ‘A sentimental education: Native servants and the cultivation of European children in the Netherlands Indies’ in Laurie J Sears (ed), Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia (Durham and London, 1996): 73 and 77–8, where Stoler writes on the colonial state’s surveillance of ‘the secreted domestic arrangements’ of families and on colonial perceptions of servants and nannies, 77–8. See also Locher-Scholten (2000a): 31, who argued that the native household was essentially closed to the Dutch.

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F Besieged by sensuality — Colonists in seductive landscapes G

Europeans were not only susceptible to the erotic presence of native women in the landscape, but also to the general seductiveness of Indies nature at large. This was cause for some concern among Dutch observers, who perceived Indies landscapes to be so insidiously sensual that they threatened to intrude on private European lives, corrupting respectable European sexual identities. Significantly, Indies landscapes viewed in this light seem to have been racialised — more specifically, construed as native — but remained gender-neutral, in that Indies landscapes were attributed with seducing European men and women indiscriminately. Not only were European men in danger of being debased by the Asian women whom they allowed into their homes, but European men and women were believed to be corruptible by the landscapes at their doorstep. The threat of seduction, then, was omnipresent, subtle and relentless, and required constant vigilance. Europeans in the Indies seemed to have felt conquered by Indies nature, both in terms of their sexual mores and, as I shall argue in Chapter 7, with respect to their racial identity.

Historians have commented widely on the association in Dutch colonial culture between race, sexuality and tropical nature, often with particular emphasis on climate.61 Colonial writers often expressed a belief that hot days and sultry nights were responsible for all sorts of self-indulgent gratifications and perversions among Europeans in the tropics. In the novel Coolie by Madelon Lulofs, set among the rubber plantations of East Sumatra in the 1920s, a balmy evening becomes the setting for a ‘seduction’ scene involving a Dutch planter and a young Javanese woman (who happens to be an indentured labourer, and is therefore all but powerless to resist him). On the one hand Donk,62 the planter, adopts a perversely methodical, even callous approach to his courtship of Karminah, the coolie. He has her brought from the barracks, makes her wait outside his house while he consumes his dinner and sips his drink on the verandah, and when he finally calls her in it is only to send

61 Hesselink: 208; Gouda (1995): 116; Stoler (1995): 156–7 — all have mentioned the tropical climate as one factor among others that corrupted European sexual mores. 62 Inexplicably, ‘Dunk’ in some English translations.

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her immediately to the bedroom, where she is told to wash herself and anoint her hair with any fragrance that she fancies in order to purge the smell of coconut oil from her tresses.63 Meanwhile, Donk sinks into a pleasant stupour of expectation wherein his perception of the dimly-lit landscape outside his bungalow plays a determining role in his decision to take a concubine:

How grand and serene the night was here, too majestic almost for love … for love of the body. Or … precisely for this kind of love that is the same for every higher form of life? Was not perhaps the lowly love of the flesh the only one possible amidst these splendours of the earth?64

Lulofs adds that Donk is ‘conscious of little else’ at this moment. Instead, ‘[h]e felt a vague relationship between his physical desire and … the stillness of the tropical night.’65

In the frosty Netherlands, Donk’s musings imply, love and the body are concealed inside and behind closed doors, and complex rules apply as to how men enter into sexual relationships and cohabitation with women. Here in Sumatra, the seductive landscape authorises what Donk’s puritanical natal environment has forbidden him — the ‘lowly love of the flesh’. Such aspirations remained possible in the tropics, it is implied, because nature has retained its preeminence over culture and ‘love [wa]s the same in all forms of life’. Were he in a European landscape, Lulofs implies, Donk’s faculty of reason and sense of decorum would no doubt prevail. Instead, the thoughtlessness that Lulofs attributes to his actions represents a regression to his simple, savage, natural self in Sumatra’s permissive frontier landscapes.

More controversial, perhaps, was Louis Couperus’ suggestion thirty years earlier in The

63 Madelon Lulofs, Koelie (Amsterdam, 1932): 95. 64 ‘Hoe grootsch en sereen was hier de nacht, té majestueus haast voor liefde … voor de liefde van het lichaam. Of, … juist voor déze liefde niet, die voor elken hogeren vorm van leven dezelfde is? Was misschien niet juist de nederige liefde van het vleesch de éénig mogelijke, temidden van dezen luister der aarde?’: Lulofs (1932): 95. 65 ‘Donk was zich van dit alles niet veel anders bewust dan misschien allen een verwantschap van zijn physiek verlangen met … de stilte van den tropischen nacht …’: Lulofs (1932): 95.

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Hidden Force that European women were also susceptible to the seductive qualities of Indies landscapes. A sensual evocation of nature commences the chapter in which Leonie van Oudijck, the Dutch wife of a government official, seduces Addy de Luce, the Eurasian son of local sugar barons. The scene unfolds behind a ‘down of velvet’66 (that is, nightfall) that obscures the scandalous events. Though relations between Europeans and Eurasians were not necessarily always considered scandalous by colonists — as long as the latter were legitimised as Europeans by marriage or official registration67 — Leonie’s affair with Addy represents the last in a series of betrayals of her entire family. Leonie manages to cuckold her husband and her step-son (with whom she is having a quasi-incestuous affair), and she also crosses her step-daughter, who has had her own sights set upon Addy. Significantly, later in the novel Otto van Oudijck reflects upon his wife’s shocking behaviour and, rather than attribute blame to a fellow European, concludes that her moral laxity must be due to the prolonged effects of exposure to the Javanese landscape.68

In some literary texts, the landscapes of the Indies assumed the power to corrupt European sexual mores in the notable absence of a tempting indigenous human presence, male or female. In a short story by Vincent Mahieu published in 1955, after the Indies had ceased to exist as a colonised space, the author conjured a memory of the powerful sensual lure of a river to a European normally confined to stuffy interiors and respectable behaviours. Mahieu was a pseudonym that the Eurasian writer and activist Jan Boon adopted when writing for Dutch audiences. Boon’s other moniker was , a pen name that he used in association with his work to preserve ‘Indo’ (Eurasian) culture in the Indies and, later, in the Netherlands.69 Mahieu, like many other colonial novelists (including, most

66 ‘[D]ons van fluweel’ — Louis Couperus, De Stille Kracht (Antwerp, 1982) [First published 1900]: 74. 67 The children of European fathers and indigenous mothers who were married were usually considered European. Children born outside marriage could be declared legitimate by the father, and could be registered as Europeans. Wives, by law, took the nationality of their husbands, so indigenous women who married European men also assumed European status. See Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison, 1983): 156; Stoler (1992): 540, 543; and Gouda (1995): 163. 68 Van Oudijck locates his problems with his wife in ‘the soil of the Indies’ — Couperus (1982): 172. 69 Margaret M Alisabah, ‘Introduction: Jan Boon, Tjalie Robinson, Vincent Mahieu’ in The Hunt for the

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prominently, Maria Dermoût), began publishing his work relatively late in life, after his banishment to the Netherlands in the late 1950s as part of Sukarno’s efforts to expunge colonialism from the newly independent Indonesia.70 By birth and by choice, then, Mahieu inhabited the ambiguous spaces between Asian and European cultures in the Indies, a position that provided him with acute insights into the standards and practices of both groups.

Mahieu’s Vivere Pericolosamente (‘Living Dangerously’) illustrates a case of sexual corruption through literal submersion in an Indies landscape — in this instance, the Ciliwung River that flows through Batavia (Jakarta). The story subverts the usual colonial association between water and eroticism by revolving around a male European character (rather than a female native), and begins with the tantalising question ‘How many people lead double lives?’.71 Mahieu suggests that even the most outwardly respectable Europeans in the Indies did, often because they had succumbed to the sensual attraction of nature. In the Batavia that Mahieu’s protagonist — a Dutch official named Barkey — inhabits, the Ciliwung River is associated with all that is not-Dutch. To him it appears as ‘the symbol of everything in the Indies that was dirty and vulgar.’72 Mijnheer Barkey, like his European neighbours, lives high up on a verge that overlooks the river and never ventures down to its banks — until one hot afternoon, that is, when the rest of European Batavia has settled down within relatively cool interiors for their siesta, and Barkey finds himself unable to sleep. Mahieu mischievously describes to his readers the pedestrian, even boring, context of

Heart: Selected Tales from the Dutch East Indies (Kuala Lumpur, 1995): viii, ix. Mahieu founded the Eurasian journal Tong-Tong. 70 Nieuwenhuys (1982): xvi; Alisabah: ix. 71 Vincent Mahieu, The Hunt for the Heart: Selected Tales from the Dutch East Indies (Kuala Lumpur, 1995): 127. 72 Mahieu: 129. Interestingly, this contrasts with another evocation of a river by PA Daum in Ups and Downs of Life in the Indies, wherein he described a party held by a distinguished planter in the hinterlands of Java, and the younger guests spontaneously decided to bath ‘en masse’ in the river — PA Daum, Ups and Downs of Life in the Indies (Singapore, 1999) [First published 1890]: 138. Perhaps this tolerant attitude toward the river was more prevalent in the ‘countryside’ rather than in Batavia, among young people looking for fun rather than among adults, and in the late nineteenth century rather than the early twentieth century.

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Barkey’s life up to this moment: his dull office job, his ‘stout pleasant wife’, whom he affectionately names his ‘Pompelmoesje’73 ‘since she was so fat’.74 Barkey is comfortable with these passionless roles, and proud of the respect that he commands in them. And yet, the river has abruptly enticed him away from his humdrum seclusion: ‘He saw a narrow strip of kali [river]. Brown, powerful, irresistable, exciting, colossal. Behind him, he felt the quiet dead things of his home …’.75

Gingerly at first, and then with increasing abandon, Barkey discovers, to his surprise, the sensual pleasures of the grubby river. Its refreshing coolness and perpetual motion provide a rousing alternative to his monotonous, sedentary existence. He surrenders to its swarming life, brimming with fish, plants and refuse, the ‘primitive disorderliness of broken crockery and wild growth’76 that cluster in its shallows, subverting the domestic tidiness that he is accustomed to. The river’s playful meandering seems to give him license to frolick ‘like a child’77 rather than adhere to the dignified adult role that he has cultivated: ‘Playing in the kali had all the sweetness of what was forbidden and the charm of what was completely private. What office manager swam in the kali? Not even a clerk third-class.’78 Barkey also relishes the renewed awareness of his own physicality, taking pride in the strengthening of his body through daily exercise. His voluntary submersion beneath the Ciliwung’s muddy waters becomes a metaphor for his growing disdain for distinctions he once relied upon: ‘The residents of the kampong further up the river had become accustomed to the sight of that queer swimming Blanda [white person] … [He] had become a phenomenon of the kali, like the other people bathing in it, like the floating filth, carcasses, and turds.’79

Predictably perhaps, disaster eventually strikes. While on expedition one day, Barkey’s outer layer of underwear is tugged free by the river and he is left with only a flimsy

73 Refers literally to a round, sweet, juicy fruit, often an apple. Thanks to Hessel Verbeek for the translation. 74 Mahieu: 128. 75 Mahieu: 142. 76 Mahieu: 130. 77 Mahieu: 130. 78 Mahieu: 131. 79 Mahieu: 132. The ‘other people’ swimming people in the river are intimated to be natives.

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remnant of clothing covering his nakedness. He makes for the nearest house upon the bank in the hope that some sympathetic servant will run home and fetch him his clothes before his wife awakes and finds him missing. No such luck is visited upon him. Barkey’s first bedraggled encounter is with Mevrouw Aubrey, a cheeky Dutch widow with a ‘famous naughty laugh’ and sparkling eyes.80 She teases Barkey about his transparent underpants, torments him by making him wait before sending for his clothes, and befuddles him with a glass of cognac so that he won’t ‘catch cold’ from the river.81 During his agonising wait in the naughty widow’s bathroom, Barkey catches a glimpes of his newly-acquired, strapping physique in the Mevrouw’s mirror. Then he notices her enticing lingerie (a jarring contrast to the practical undergarments belonging to his wife), and begins to indulge in private reveries about his flirtatious saviour.82 When finally he ventures out onto Mevrouw Aubrey’s verandah to collect his clothes, he finds her draped suggestively on the divan, and the last vestiges of his resolve dissipate: ‘He was afraid, and he felt attracted to the object of his fear. There was in her something like swimming in the kali.’83 Barkey’s infidelity is brief and, Mahieu leads us to believe, isolated; but the damage is done, and our (anti-)hero knows it. Upon returning to his house, Barkey seals the back exit leading down to the river, shutting the profligate landscape out forever and confining himself once again to his respectable bourgeois domesticity.

Mahieu’s clever and amusing narrative explicitly links the sensual qualities of Indies nature with the sexual transgression of two Europeans. The female party, Mevrouw Aubrey, is notably unruffled by the moral implications of her encounter. Indeed, her seduction of Barkey is a metaphor for the amoral power of Indies landscapes, which encourage indulgence and the entertainment of sensual, if fleeting, pleasures. In Mahieu’s tale there is no indigenous mediation in Barkey’s demise other than the landscape itself which, significantly, is imbued with the seductive qualities that are usually attributed to promiscuous native women or lascivious indigenous men. We should perhaps add

80 Mahieu: 135. 81 Mahieu: 137. 82 Mahieu: 138. 83 Mahieu: 141.

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landscape, then, to the body and the home as spaces where Ann Laura Stoler and others have suggested that race, gender and the production of European desires were negotiated.84 Indeed, natural landscapes contained both of these contested sites, unifying bodies and domestic spaces within a larger, specifically indigenous and tropical context.

F G

Much research to date has been directed at unravelling the ways in which native bodies were objectified by the colonial gaze,85 and at discourses surrounding the construction and maintenance of colonial identities in the domestic spaces shared with Asians.86 These avenues of inquiry have yielded many fruitful insights into the contours of private life in colonial contexts, but while scholarship has been focussed inward, as it were, it has overlooked wider references of meaning within which cultural identities developed. The natural landscape was an important component in these processes.

In the visual culture of Europeans in the Indies, women were clearly differentiated according to the manner in which and the kinds of spaces that they inhabited. European and upper class Javanese women shared much more in common in this regard than they did with ordinary indigenous women, who pervaded Indies landscapes in diverse roles and were also, significantly, most likely to be subject to the interference and exploitation of probing European eyes. There was a strong association between water and erotic opportunity in colonial visual art, one that was often pursued through voyeurism in public

84 Stoler (1995): 194. Much of Stoler’s work considers the body and the home in the colonial context. See Bibliography. 85 Tamara L Hunt, ‘Introduction’ in Tamara L Hunt and Micheline R Lessard (eds), Women and the Colonial Gaze (New York, 2002): 1. The‘colonial gaze’ typically refers to seeing colonies through eyes ‘blurred by misinformation, misconceptions, and stereotypes.’ Colonisers often attributed so-called feminine characteristics (weakness, submissiveness, irrationality, and the need for protection) to subject peoples to indicate something unfamiliar and undesirable. See also Frances Gouda, ‘The gendered rhetoric of colonialism and anti-colonialism in twentieth-century Indonesia’, Indonesia, 55, 1993: 6. 86 See particularly the works of Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Ann Laura Stoler and Frances Gouda cited in footnotes throughout this chapter.

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spaces. This distinguished European photographers and painters not only from their counterparts in the French and British colonies of the Middle East and North Africa, whose fanatasies were typically played out indoors, but also, if we remember Chapter 1, from the practices of local Muslim elites, whose command of both water and women was often a mark of their authority and privilege.

The effect of the tropical climate on women was differentiated by race. Writers and colonial authorities held that European women were sexually enervated in the tropics, while native women who had been raised in the same climate were thought to be energetically promiscuous. This association perhaps laid the foundation for the notion that the landscapes of the Indies themselves were sensual and seductive, and could fundamentally alter the moral character of those to whom the tropics were foreign. Significantly, Indies landscapes were imbued with a gender-neutral racial identity, one that eroded European men’s and women’s sexual morals indiscriminately. Nature in the Indies was sexualised for its qualities as a native space, not for its feminine associations alone, and was therefore deemed responsible for steering Europeans toward interracial relationships. Thus, in fiction, a sultry tropical night could become the scapegoat for a Dutchman’s resort to concubinage. Equally (and somewhat in contradiction to the colonial belief that Dutch women lost their sexual appetite in the tropics), the climate might explain the promiscuity of a European woman who disgraced her entire family with her behaviour. In other examples, a powerful landscape might induce inexplicable infidelities between Europeans, who were moved by mysterious sensual forces.The potency of indigenous women as corrupting influences, which was their stereotypical role in domestic spaces, according to colonial wisdom, was therefore augmented and ultimately outweighed by the more pernicious sensuality of the tropical landscape in broader contexts.

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F Chapter 7 G

Identity: Being Dutch in the Tropics

Arguably the greatest anxiety associated with environment in colonial art from the Indies was to do with the maintenance of European identities. Indeed, this concern lay at the heart of many of the themes in Dutch art and literature that have been discussed so far, most particularly the intricate set of colonial associations between race, environment, gender and morality that were explored in the previous chapter. Because colonial painting and, to a lesser extent, photography were media in which many Dutch artists tended to indulge their wishes and fantasies, or used as a tool to convey their ideals and assumptions, it is difficult to isolate and explicate concisely the slippery issue of identity in these sources. Fortunately, Dutch colonial writers frequently adopted an unusually probing, candid approach to Indies society, particularly those who were active in the first half of the twentieth century. In previous chapters it has often been novelists whose work provides the clearest evidence for the complex cultural attitudes that underpinned ostensibly simple, idealistic visual images of Indies landscapes. The richest vocabulary of ‘being Dutch’ in the tropics, then, is found in colonial literature, and it will consequently be the exclusive focus of this final chapter.

Many Dutch colonial novels have been trawled by historians for a variety of themes, most prominently, the negotiation of racial and sexual identities through social interactions.1 However, few of these studies have sought to systematically explore the construction of

1 See, for example, the following excellent anthologies of Dutch colonial literature: Rob Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies: A History of Dutch Colonial Literature (Amherst, 1982); EM Beekman, Fugitive Dreams: An Anthology of Dutch Colonial Literature (Amherst, 1988), and Troubled Pleasures: Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies, 1600–1950 (Oxford, 1996); and Lily E Clerkx and Wim F Wertheim, Living in Deli: Its Society as Imagined in Colonial Fiction (Amsterdam, 1991). 7 – Identity

colonial identities with reference to Dutch (or Indonesian, for that matter) encounters with landscape. This chapter represents an attempt to begin a re-evaluation of some colonial novels using the prism of landscape to extract insights into the notion of ‘Dutchness’. Three novels that have been mentioned already will be employed as case studies: De Stille Kracht (The Hidden Force)2 by Louis Couperus (1900); Rubber by Madelon Lulofs (1931), and De Tienduizend Dingen (The Ten Thousand Things) by Maria Dermoût (1955).3 This sample of course cannot claim to be representative of all Dutch colonial literature. It is intended only as a starting point for renewed inquiry, and as an end point for the argument of this thesis — that landscape was an important category in Dutch colonial art and literature, one that was central to the cultural dialogue (among Europeans, and between Europeans and Indonesians) on the reasons for and impact of colonialism. The three novels chosen each contain a profound tone of ambivalence toward the painterly ‘beautiful Indies’, and even toward the triumphalism and optimism that was expressed in some categories of colonial photograph. All three writers certainly waxed lyrical about the grandeur of Indies landscapes, and celebrated the imposition of order upon wild frontiers. But they also expressed doubts and concerns about what it meant to be Dutch in the Indies — Europeans in an Asian landscape.

F Misfits and malcontents — Three colonial novelists G

A number of scholars of colonial literature have argued that there was something peculiar about colonialism that attracted or produced writers who did not quite fit into the mainstream of their natal culture:4 bohemians who sought an alternative to the strictures of

2 The title of this novel is always given as ‘The Hidden Force’ in English, which is unfortunate since ‘Quiet’ or even ‘Silent’ may have been a more appropriate translation. 3 These dates refer to the publication of these novels in the original Dutch. I will be using my own translations of quotations from editions where possible throughout, since the English versions are mostly quite old and, at times, inaccurate. 4 This has been noted by other scholars of Dutch colonial literature. See, for example, Nieuwenhuys (1982): xxvi, where he argues that since there was no sophisticated literary culture in the Netherlands Indies, and colonial society was not very diverse, those who took an interest in literature often did not quite ‘fit’. See

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European society; individuals who moved between the permeable boundaries of European and Asian cultures, but felt completely at home in neither one;5 disgruntled observers of and participants in colonial government and business who vacillated between celebration and condemnation of Dutch rule in the Indies6 — these are some of the characterisations that have been made about European colonial writers. Colonial novelists readily discussed sensitive topics like sex and violence in their work, issues that were almost entirely absent from (Continental) Dutch literature until after the Second World War.7 Jean Gelman Taylor has pointed out that European women in the Indies dealt with the issues of concubinage and the illegitimate children that were often born from mixed-race unions in novels long before they became issues for debate in the Dutch parliament.8 Multatuli, arguably the most famous of Dutch colonial writers was, in EM Beekman’s estimation, ‘temperamentally and artistically a most unlikely Dutchman’, both in the novel style of language that he introduced to nineteenth century Dutch literature and in the willingness he demonstrated to question the standards of the colonial administration.9 ‘It seems,’ Beekman has written, linking art with the tropical climate, ‘as if the finest colonial writing depended on a kind of intellectual prickly heat’.10 And yet, as Edward Said suggested, even when adopting a critical tone European colonial writers remained ever part of the imperialist project because

also Beekman (1996): 7–8, who argued that Dutch colonial writers tended to boast idiosyncracies, and who also noted that their work fitted neither into Asian nor mainstream European literary traditions. 5 Beekman (1996b): 16–7. 6 Early post-colonial scholarly treatments of Multatuli, author of Max Havelaar, provided the model for this kind of literary figure. See, for example, Justus M van der Kroef’s study, The Dialectic of Colonial Indonesian History (Amsterdam, 1963): 26. Van der Kroef described Multatuli as a a critic of some colonial policies, certainly, but he remained essentially an advocate of enlightened reform rather than decolonisation. Reinder P Meijer was in agreement with this view of Multatuli as a liberal colonial, one who took issue with the colonial establishment, but not with the principle of colonialism — see Literature of the Low Countries (Cheltenham, 1978): 228. 7 Beekman (1996b): 47. See also his discussion of E du Perron, pp 413–25. 8 Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison WI, 1983): 174. 9 Beekman (1996b): 218. 10 Beekman (1988): 164.

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they were intimately implicated in the process of conceptualising a possession.11

Said, who wrote extensively on the role of European writers in constructing colonial identities,12 thought that ‘[t]o be a European in the Orient always involves being a consciousness set apart from, and unequal with, its surroundings’.13 Of course, Said was then writing principally of the Middle East and North Africa, not of Southeast Asia,14 and while this is not the place for an extended critique of Said’s controversial theories it bears remembering that, for the Netherlands Indies, there are of course sundry historical examples that suggest a far closer and more complex relationship between Europeans and Asians.15 However, from the late nineteenth century onward the new European arrival in the Indies was, after all, increasingly likely to be a temporary resident and expatriate rather than a blijver. While his or her absence from home was determined by choice (usually the decision to take advantage of a career opportunity) rather than necessity, some of the

11 Edward W Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1994): 80. 12 See Edward W Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, 1995) [First published 1978]; Culture and Imperialism, above; and Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, 2000). Said also discussed his views on literary colonial identities in a series of interviews — Gauri Viswanathan (ed), Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W Said (New York, 2001). 13 Said (1995): 157. 14 In Orientalism, Said referred — rather unhelpfully — to the ‘Islamic Orient’ (which might, theoretically, have embraced large parts of Southeast Asia, although it was not Said’s intention to encompass this region): 74–5. A closer reading of Orientalism proves that he was referring mainly to British and French colonies in the Middle East and North Africa. 15 See Taylor’s study of VOC Batavia in Social World of Batavia (1983). Fascinating figures like the linguist Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk (1824–94) also provide nineteenth century examples of Europeans in the Indies who rejected mainstream colonial society in favour of the groups whose languages he studied. Van der Tuuk was born in Melaka to a Eurasian mother and Dutch father, and discovered his talent for languages while studying law in the Netherlands. Though officially employed by a Christian mission for much of his adulthood in the Indies, Van der Tuuk was an atheist, and his biographers have suggested that he treated his missionary posting as an opportunity to follow other interests. Van der Tuuk learned Toba-Batak during the 1850s, and lived closely among his informants, rejecting overtures from Europeans in the area to join colonial society. He followed a similar pattern in Bali, where he lived from 1870 until his death. Here he compiled but never finished a dictionary of Kawi (Old Balinese) — see Nieuwenhuys (1982): 102; Beekman (1988): 130-4, 141–3.

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colonist’s experience was shared with that other modern literary figure, the exile, most notably the sense of ‘solitude and estrangement’ that came from living in ‘an alien country’.16

Such was perhaps the curious nature of the late colonial state: that it encouraged the movement of peoples — European and Asian — across borders and spaces, while officially sanctioning, through laws and customs, cultural intransigence. Numerous scholars have noted that in places like East Sumatra, on the ‘frontier’ of the expanding Dutch colonial state, alienation was common to the experience of Javanese and Chinese workers on the plantations, not just Europeans.17 Planters and coolies, despite the economic and ethnic hierarchies that separated them, may well equally have felt themselves far from the landscapes of their birth in Sumatra. There is also evidence to suggest that both groups, Europeans and Asians, also nursed similar hopes of accumulating enough money to leave Sumatra, so that they might one day return to their respective homelands.18 One might even go further and suggest that the excesses associated with plantation life in both coolie and planter quarters — gambling for the Chinese and Javanese, overspending and drinking for the Europeans, womanising for both groups — functioned as palliatives for people who were divided by class, race, gender and different legal codes,19 but who were united by

16 Said (2000): 181. Said himself grew up in British Egypt, and Lebanon, and wrote in his autobiography that his Palestinian/Arab identity (which he took greater pains to cultivate in his later life) was often at odds with his colonial experience, and later, with his experience in the United States — see his aptly-titled Out of Place: A Memoir (London, 1999): 137. 17 Clerkx and Wertheim: 43. See also scholarly work on plantation culture in Deli, particularly Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial State in Southeast Asia (Delhi, 1990); and Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (Ann Arbor, 1995). 18 See, for example, Madelon Lulofs’ novels Coolie (1932) and Rubber (1931), which will be discussed further below. In Rubber, Frank and Marion Versteegh’s whole object in journeying to Sumatra is to make money fast and return to Europe wealthy. First the colonial culture of consumption and then the Depression interrupt this strategy. In Coolie, Ruki (a Javanese coolie) nurses a plan to return to his homeland once his contract has expired — a plot that fails many times over, since Ruki cannot seem to abstain from spending his savings (especially on gambling). 19 ‘Europeans’ in Sumatra can be taken as a reasonably cohesive group within themselves, although planters in tobacco and rubber were frequently of many different nationalities (including American). Coolies

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dreams of respite from monotonous work and unfamiliar landscapes — an attempt, in short, to dull the pain of longing for ‘home’.

Some Europeans of course preferred the novelty of life in the colonies to the predictability of Continental society. In his book Colonialism and Homosexuality (2003), Robert Aldrich presents numerous examples of homosexuals (whose inclinations were often outlawed in Europe)20 finding greater opportunity to pursue relationships with other men in the colonies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ‘In Europe, life was full of dichotomies — respectable versus immoral behaviour, natural and unnatural sex, homosexual versus heterosexual acts. In the colonies, things were different. Misbehaviour (so long as it was relatively discreet) would be tolerated’ among Europeans.21 The fantasy (or indeed, reality) of an intimate relationship with an exotic partner formed a theme in the art of many European painters and writers, including Louis Couperus who, according to Aldrich, lingers on the possibility of such an attachment in his description of the relationship between Theo van Oudijck and Addy de Luce in his novel The Hidden Force.22

The fact that many Dutch colonial writers harboured views and lifestyles that were not representative of mainstream Dutch or colonial society must prevent their ideas from being attributed too widely to their contemporaries. However, the controversies that some colonial novels generated often indicated public sensitivities toward ambiguous subjects,

(indentured labourers) comprised two major groups: Chinese (who were the first group to be imported to Deli in the late nineteenth century); and Javanese (who were imported in the early twentieth century). These two groups usually lived in separate barracks and answered to supervisors from their own ethnic group when they were combined on one plantation. Cultural divisions between Chinese and Javanese were reinforced by Dutch views of these two groups. Colonists often commented, for example, on the notion that the Javanese were less industrious workers, but that this was preferable to the militancy of Chinese workers. The Coolie Ordinances, the first of which was introduced in 1880, applied special regulations to all Asian workers, including criminal penalties for breaches of contract that, significantly, did not apply to Europeans. Women of any ethnic group were in short supply on plantations, and Asian women were commonly treated as a commodity by workers of all ethnic groups — Stoler (1995a): 17, 28, 34; Breman (1990): 33, 91–2. 20 Robert Aldrich, Homosexuality and Colonialism (London and New York, 2003): 404. 21 Aldrich: 410. 22 Aldrich: 119–122.

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such as race and identity, that resided just below the surface of colonial culture. Dutch colonial novels may have reached a relatively small readership in the Indies — 360,000 readers of Dutch by 193023 — but the material for these books was often grounded in evaluations of ‘real’ life and moral dilemmas in the colonies. Further, it is arguable that some novels became part of the fabric of colonial intellectual culture. Those that have retained their renown to the present day have, according to Pamela Pattynama, penetrated the ‘collective unconscious’ of modern-day Dutch audiences.24

Pattynama was referring specifically in this case to Louis Couperus’ The Hidden Force, which was published in 1900 in the Netherlands, where it met with a scandalised reception. Couperus’ portrayal of Leonie van Oudijck, a licentious Creole married to a conscientious Dutch civil servant, attracted particular censure. Although Louis Couperus was a prolific writer, producing almost twenty works of poetry and prose within his lifetime, The Hidden Force became arguably his most famous novel. It was made into a television series for Dutch audiences during the 1970s, a development which, according to Pattynama, has made the novel a byword for ‘the emotional resonance and cognitive impact of any exotic thing or person’ in Dutch culture.25 During his own lifetime, Couperus’ work was generally better known abroad than it was at home. In the Netherlands his books were often judged as improper, even pornographic, and after 1900 they sold so poorly that Couperus decided it might be time for a career change and he turned to journalism for a living. His infamy at home notwithstanding, by 1927 fifteen of his books had been translated into English and he visited Britain to promote his work on two separate occasions, in 1898 and 1921.26

Throughout much of his adult life Louis Couperus (1863–1923) seemed to garner

23 See the section on colonial literature by Jean Gelman Taylor in John H McGlynn (ed), Language and Literature: Indonesian Heritage (Singapore, 1999): 88. The figure provided includes Dutch and Indonesians. 24 Pamela Pattynama, ‘Secrets and danger: Interracial sexuality in Louis Couperus’ The Hidden Force and Dutch colonial literature around 1900’ in Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (eds), Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville and London, 1998): 88. 25 Pattynama: 88. 26 EM Beekman, ‘Introduction’ in Louis Couperus, The Hidden Force (London, 1992): 12, 14–15.

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controversy, so he serves as an appropriate example of the eccentric writer who did not fit into Dutch or colonial society (and, to some extent, did not care). Couperus was renowned for cultivating an image of exotic nonconformism. ‘Nothing about him suggested the conventional idea of a Dutchman’ said his contemporary, the British literary critic Edmund Gosse, of Couperus in 1925,27 and his biographers since have generally concurred.28 Couperus’ early experience of the Indies came to him through family connections — a genealogy of civil servants and Indies matrons (ethnically Dutch but born and bred in the tropics) stretching back to the eighteenth century. His parents were both distinguished figures in colonial society, his father a landowner and judicial officer, and his mother, daughter to a former Governor-General and Vice President of the Council of the Indies. Couperus’ sisters all wed men who wore the gold braid of the civil service and Elizabeth Baud, the woman who would eventually become his wife, also hailed from a prominent Indies family who were among the first to govern the tobacco regions of Deli in Sumatra.29

The youth that Couperus spent in the Indies has been characterised by EM Beekman, one of the most distinguished proponents of Dutch colonial literature, as a particularly formative period in Couperus’ life in that the freedoms he experienced in the colony were later juxtaposed against the constraints, both social and environmental, that Couperus perceived when he returned to Holland as a young man.30 From this time onward, according to Beekman, Couperus suffered a profound sense of dislocation that would remain with him for the rest of his life, one that he (and his biographers) explained using the vocabulary of environmental determinism: he felt himself a visitor to the Netherlands, always hankering for warmer climes and easy-going peoples like those he encountered in ‘Latin’ Europe and the tropics.31

27 Edmund Gosse, ‘Louis Couperus: A tribute and a memory’ in Silhouettes (London, 1925): 266. 28 For example, see Beekman (1992): 6–8, 16–7, and Ian Baruma, ‘Louis Couperus: The Eurasians of the Dutch East Indies’ in The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West (London and Boston, 1996): 71–2. 29 Beekman (1992): 1–3, 10. 30 Beekman (1992): 4–5. 31 Beekman (1992): 4. This discord manifested itself, according to Beekman, in The Hidden Force as a tension between the ‘solar freedom’ afforded by a life in the tropics and the ‘hibernal constriction’ that

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The dandyish, indulgent persona that Couperus cultivated as an adult frequently led to both censure and admiration, the latter particularly from women32 — energies misspent by the hapless ladies, since Couperus’ sexual preferences lay elsewhere. The tensions resulting from Couperus’ homosexuality and the social pressure to conceal it were publicly resolved by his marriage in 1891 to his cousin. Posterity has forgiven Louis the sexual inclinations and extravagent personality that his fin-de-siecle peers often denounced him for, such that he is celebrated in the Netherlands today as something like a Dutch equivalent to Oscar Wilde.33 Indeed, Ian Baruma has argued that The Hidden Force may have retained its popularity because its exploration of ambiguity, together with the author’s historical status as an ‘outsider’ in Dutch society, resonates with modern audiences who have become accustomed to uncertain boundaries in both life and art.34

For Madelon Lulofs (1899–1958) the boundaries of daily experience were perhaps set out relatively clearly, particularly once she had adopted her role as a Dutch planter’s wife. By the time of her second marriage, however, Lulofs had begun to dislodge herself from the conservative parameters of colonial expectations. Madelon Lulofs was born in Surabaya, Java, and spent almost the first thirty years of her life in the Indies, often in remote locations where her father carried out his duties as a government official.35 She spent part of her childhood at a military outpost in Aceh36 and grew up in the aftermath of the war there. The conflict clearly left a deep and lasting impression on her, one that was not

engulfed life in the Netherlands, and between the masculine form of power that dominated the daylight hours and the feminine wile that reigned supreme after dusk: 5, 25–6. Similar observations have been made by Baruma: 67–8. 32 Beekman (1992): 6, 8. 33 Couperus’ sexuality in the context of turn-of-the-century European ideas about homosexuality was the subject of an exhibition in the Louis Couperus Museum, The Hague, 20 November 2003–2 May 2004. 34 Baruma: 71–2. 35 Between 1916 and 1919 he was an advisor on government policy toward the Outer Islands — Anthony Reid, ‘Introduction’ to Laszlo Szekely, Tropic Fever: The Adventures of a Planter in Sumatra (Kuala Lumpur, 1979): v, viii. 36 Nieuwenhuys (1982): 173.

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exclusively shaped by patriotic sentiments. In 1948 she published an historical novel, to great critical acclaim, about the heroine of the Aceh resistance, Cut Nyak Dien.37 Lulofs’ account was based on an Acehnese chronicle, the Hikayat Perang Kompanie (History of the War Against the Company). Rob Nieuwenhuys argued that Lulofs’ sympathy with Cut Nyak Dien was grounded within the same moral position as her identification with the resistance against the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War Two.38 This may well be partly true, but Nieuwenhuys glossed all too smoothly over the fact that the enemy in Tjoet Nja Din was the KNIL soldier, not the German Nazi.

Lulofs went to Deli in 1918 and was ensconsed in her first marriage (to a planter) by the age of nineteen. For the twelve-year duration of this union she lived on a rubber estate in Asahan, 125 km to the south of Medan on the east coast of Sumatra. While still married Lulofs fell in love with another planter (and, like her, a writer), a Hungarian named Laszlo Szekely, whom she married in 1930 and was forced to return to Europe with when the scandal errupted.39 Relatively little is known of Madelon Lulofs’ second husband, but it is evident that he displeased the colonial establishment with his criticims of the plantation system on Sumatra. Laszlo Szekely lived as a planter during the first decades of the twentieth century and wrote an account of his experiences in Hungary after the First World War.40 In the 1935 Dutch-language preface to Tropic Fever,41 Szekely described his novel as a stemmingsbeeld (image of a state of mind), a piece of work that was somewhere between novel and autobiography.42 The novel does not appear to have been very successful in Hungary, but it attracted increasing international attention in the 1930s when it was translated into Italian, German, Dutch, and English.43 The 1936 American edition

37 Anthony Reid, ‘Introduction’ to Madelon Lulofs, Coolie (Oxford, 1982): vi–vii. 38 Nieuwenhuys (1982): 175. 39 Reid (1979): ix. 40 Reid (1979): vii. 41 Published in Hungarian and Dutch as ‘From Primeval Forest to Plantation: A Tale of a Planter’s life’ (Oeserdoektoel az Ultetvenyeking in Hungarian, and Van Oerwoud tot Plantage. Verhaal van een Plantersleven in Dutch) — Reid (1979): viii, x. 42 Reid (1979): viii. 43 Reid (1979): x.

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excited the most notice, possibly because the United States Congress had by this time prohibited imports of agricultural products from places — like Dutch Sumatra — where indentured labour was used. (This measure was enacted in 1931 to protect American economic interests during the Great Depression as much as it was designed to protect exploited labour).44 Late in 1936, reluctant to add fuel to the fire of international indignation over the coolie system (which, according to Anthony Reid, Szekely did not support),45 the colonial Volksraad (People’s Council) in the Indies campaigned for publications that criticised Sumatran labour conditions to be censored.46

It was in such a context that Madelon Lulofs’ novels47 were also publicly received. Lulofs was the first person to write about Deli in Dutch,48 and she later translated the warts-and-all account of life on the tobacco plantations that her new husband had written in Hungarian for Dutch audiences. East Sumatra was brought into the colonial sphere of production in the 1870s and was still undergoing colonial development during the 1920s, the period in which Lulofs’ books were set. Both she and Szekely were critical of the vagaries of plantation life, particularly the excesses and degeneracy of Europeans who were far removed from the censure of their fellows. Lulofs also condemned the exploitation of the labourers who were imported from Java to be employed as contract workers on the estates. (Lulofs also includes Chinese coolies in her novels, who were of course the first to be used as coolies in Sumatra; however, she is notably unsympathetic in her portrayal of the Chinese). Lulofs’ novels also provide frank insights into delicate subjects like concubinage and interracial relationships, which were common on Sumatran plantations before 1919, when the Deli Company first allowed its male employees to bring their wives to Sumatra.49 The unpalatable realities of

44 Reid (1979): ix. 45 Reid (1979): vii. 46 Reid,(1979): xi. 47 Other books that were based on Lulofs’ experiences in the Indies include De Andere Wereld (The Other World) (1933), Emigranten (Emigrants) (1933), and De Hongertucht (Journey of Famine) (1936). The latter was based on Lulofs’ correspondences with the survivor of a failed mission into the Sumatran highlands in 1911 — Nieuwenhuys (1982): 173–4. 48 Clerkx and Wertheim: 2. 49 Nieuwenhuys (1982): 167.

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brutality, monotony, violence and melancholy that characterised frontier life were also described with candour in Lulofs’ novels. Some of her views were in broad agreement with the prevailing standard among European planters and colonial officials: the need to cajole diligence from ‘lazy natives’ with the use of strict contracts and penal clauses, for example, was never fundamentally questioned in her novels.50 It was her condemnation of the treatment of coolies and the uncouth behaviour of Europeans in Sumatra that lent her work its incendiary character, and that set Lulofs on the outskirts of the society that she wrote about.

Nothing so controversial filled the pages of the novels and short stories penned by Maria Dermoût (1888–1961), many of them after the Dutch colonial state had been replaced by the Republic of Indonesia. Her works are discussed here even though they were published in the 1950s51 because they remember colonial Java and Ambon as Dermoût experienced them in the early decades of the twentieth century. Dermoût does not properly fit the profile of the deviant colonial writer. Not every author was energised by a dissatisfaction with the society that he or she lived in. Indeed, though lonely through recurrent periods of her life, and despite enduring a series of tragedies and personal losses,52 Dermoût appears by all accounts to have been relatively satisfied with her place in colonial society. Her work does not include explicitly political or moral criticisms of colonial rule. However, Dermoût’s novels provided a lucid insight into the unstable boundaries of identity within old colonial (blijver) families who, though often more sympathetic to indigenous customs and

50 Indeed, in the foreword to the English translation Lulofs wrote that Coolie was ‘an attempt to explain the soul of a strange race that still remains mysterious to us of the West. I had no political aims in my view. I merely observed the disturbance caused in the mind of the Oriental confronted with the Western regime — victim of a more or less necessary system’: x. 51 See Nieuwenhuys (1982): 170–6, for a full list of Dermoût’s works, which were published in 1970 as Verzameld Werk (Collected Works). 52 Dermoût’s mother died when she was a baby. Dermoût also lived through the destruction of Arnhem during the Second World War, lost her son during his incarceration in a Japanese internment camp, and outlived her husband by ten years — Johan van der Woude, Maria Dermoût: De Vrouw en de Schrjfster (S’-Gravenhage, 1973): 62; Nieuwenhuys (1982): 55; PMH Groen ‘Ten Thousand Things and A Jewelled Hair Comb as historical sources: Fiction or fact?’ in Taufik Abdullah and Sartono Kartodirdjo (eds), Papers of the Fourth Indonesian-Dutch History Conference, July, 1983: 91; Beekman (1996): 482–4.

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surroundings than newly arrived colonists, still struggled both publicly and privately with what it meant to be Dutch in an Indonesian landscape.

Like Madelon Lulofs, Maria Dermoût was born in the Indies and spent a large part of her life there. She also married young (although unlike Lulofs, she seems to have remained satisfied with her first choice). Dermoût had deep familial roots in the Indies. Her great-grandfather, the first to settle in the archipelago, was a sea captain in the VOC, and each family member thereafter was to spend at least part of their life in the Indies, including her own children and grandchildren, all but one of whom were born in the archipelago.53 Though subject to frequent scholarly analysis, Dermoût’s work is rarely characterised as contentious. In fact, her biographer, Johan van der Woude, included her work in the genre of ‘homesickness’ or nostalgia literature that emerged among Dutch and Eurasian writers after Indonesian independence.54 Like Couperus and Lulofs, Dermoût wrote her best known work only after returning to Europe, her reflections presumably enhanced by temporal and physical distance from the Indies, and her imagination distended by the contrast of peoples and landscapes that she had moved between.

Dermoût published her first novel relatively late in life, at the age of 63, when her children were grown up and her husband had passed away.55 Nog Pas Gisteren (Just Yesterday) (1951) was based on her recollections of the time she spent between the ages of six and eleven on a sugar estate near Madiun in Java, where she lived with her father and stepmother.56 The novel received substantial critical acclaim, was reprinted eight times in Dutch, won several literary prizes in the Netherlands, and was later translated into German and English.57 Her second novel, De Tienduizend Dingen (The Ten Thousand Things) (1955), was also highly successful in the Netherlands and has since been translated into eleven languages.58 It was based on four years that Dermoût spent on Ambon, in Maluku,

53 Nieuwenhuys (1982): 255–6. 54 Van der Woude: 73. 55 Van der Woude: 70; Nieuwenhuys (1982): 255–6. 56 Nieuwenhuys (1982): 255. 57 Van der Woude: 154, 167; Beekman (1996): 485. 58 Beekman (1996): 483, 485.

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from 1910. While she was not enamoured with the climate on Ambon — heavy rains interspersed with long dry spells — the landscapes of the coast left a deep impression upon her,59 as they did many colonial writers and artists who had come before her.60 Dermoût’s final years were spent in Noordwijk, Holland, on the dunes overlooking the North Sea, a vista she often wrote about in her diary.61 However, her biographers have asserted that it was Indonesia’s landscapes that affected Dermoût most profoundly. Nieuwenhuys went so far as to suggest that, by virtue of her preference for Indonesian subjects, Dermoût cannot properly be considered ‘a real Dutch author’.62 ‘[U]ntil the very last’, Nieuwenhuys proclaimed, ‘she lived in Indonesia with and through her books’.63 In this way, perhaps, Dermoût personified the figure of exile that, on the one hand, set her and many of her writer fellows apart from European society, but that also saw the Dutch who stayed in Indonesia after independence expelled under the Sukarno regime. It was this sense of spatial and historical displacement that resonated with many other Europeans who remembered the Indies, and that led to the establishment of ‘Indo’ publications and formal societies in the post-colonial era.64

59 Van der Woude (1973), p. 60, 61. 60 See the discussion of Dutch views of the coast of Ambon in Chapter 2. 61 Nieuwenhuys (1982): 264. 62 Nieuwenhuys (1982): 257. 63 Nieuwenhuys (1982): 256. Nieuwenhuys also included a section on Dermoût in his Komen en Blijven (Amsterdam, 1982). 64 Writers Rob Nieuwenhuys and Jan Boon (discussed in the previous chapter) were instrumental in reviving ‘Indo’ culture in the Netherlands and abroad after the Second World War. Boon was the child of a Dutch father and Eurasian mother. After leaving Indonesia in the 1950s, he established the renowned Indo journal Tong Tong (still published as Moesson today) — Margaret M Alisabah, ‘Introduction: Jan Boon, Tjalie Robinson, Vincent Mahieu’ in The Hunt for the Heart: Selected Tales from the Dutch East Indies (Kuala Lumpur, 1995). Nieuwenhuys was born in Java, and did not go to the Netherlands until he was 19 years old. He returned several times to Indonesia after independence. In his own writings he stated that he always felt himself to be ‘between two homelands’. Some of his attempts to come to terms with his recollections of colonial Indonesia include his memoir Vergeelde Portretten (Faded Portraits) (1955), and his collection of published photograph ‘albums’, starting with Tempo Doeloe in 1961. About the latter Nieuwenhuys wrote: ‘Some people regard Tempo Doeloe as nostalgic but the book deals with an era from long before my own time. It may well arouse a feeling of nostalgia in others, but as far as I am concerned, I think I am as ambivalent about tempo dulu as I am about my childhood’ — Niewenhuys (1982): 328, and more generally,

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F Immersion and transformation — precarious European identities in the tropics G

One of the fundamental paradoxes of colonial rule from the latter half of the nineteenth century onward was that Europeans expected one another to live within and yet remain separate from the landscapes that they had transplanted themselves into, as well as from the Asians whom they governed (and, in many cases, shared homes with). In the Netherlands Indies, fear of immersion in the ‘native’ population and the consequent erosion of Dutch characteristics that was believed to accompany such a decline went hand in hand with colonial anxieties over lengthy exposure to the alien landscapes of the Indies, so dramatically different to those of the Netherlands. This has been discussed to some extent in Chapter 2, where Dutch responses to the ‘intangibles’ of the tropical environment were briefly surveyed. In some colonial novels, European responses to the altering effects of landscape and climate were discussed in great depth. The three authors whose work is reviewed here treated this theme of identity in response to environment in two distinct ways: either as a social concern that was mediated by the intervention of European women as racial guardians; or, more subtlely, as a personal, individual preoccupation that involved the negotiation of public and private identities. Both thematic approaches construed Europeans in a complex dialogue between themselves, with Asians, but also, and importantly, with the environment.

Women as mediators65 between culture and nature

323–9. Marguerite Schenkhuisen, who published her own memoirs of life in the Indies in 1993, also knew Nieuwenhuys and was involved in the revival of Indo culture among expatriates in — Marguerite Schenkhuisen, Memoirs of an Indo Woman: Twentieth Century Life in the East Indies and Abroad (Athens, 1993). 65 The concept for this section owes part of its inception to some of the themes raised in the book by Sita van Bemmelen, Madelon Djajadiningrat-Nieuwenhuis, Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Elly Touwen-Bouwsma (eds), Women and Mediation in Indonesia (Leiden, 1992).

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Both Couperus’ The Hidden Force and Lulofs’ Rubber featured male and female Dutch characters who were confronted with an alien tropical environment, who were tempted by its seductive qualities to form relationships that transgressed bourgeois European norms, and whose racial and moral characters were ultimately defined by their ability to resist immersion and transformation within the landscapes of the Indies. Significantly, it is the ‘pure’ Dutch, female character with strong emotional ties to Europe who prevails over the enervating effects of the tropics in both authors’ works. Male Dutch characters, and Eurasian or Creole female protagonists, were portrayed as being far more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the environment. This authorial judgment was perhaps grounded partly in an appreciation of history. Even in the twentieth century, after a sustained influx of European women, a large proportion of Dutch men continued to take Asian wives rather than choose spouses from the Netherlands: in 1925, nearly 30 percent of Europeans in the Indies still selected indigenous or Eurasian marriage partners, and in 1940 the figure still stood at 20 percent.66 Dutch men, then, often divided their cultural (and personal) allegiances between Europe and the Indies.

At the same time, it was from the late nineteenth century that sharper racial distinctions were drawn in scientific and official circles, and that moral degradation became associated with racial mixing. Before the nineteenth century — more particularly, before the period of British rule between 1811 and 1816 — a hybrid colonial society had been accepted as the norm by Dutch elites in the Indies.67 In fact, prior to the increased segregation of Europeans and Asians in the nineteenth century, it was sometimes suggested that Eurasian children had an advantage over ‘pure’ Dutch as the latter were too weak to survive the tropics.68 By the early twentieth century such views had been replaced by a new orthodoxy that conferred prestige upon those with undiluted Dutch heritage. Dark skin became conflated with moral shadiness: Eurasions occupied a precarious social (not to mention economic and political) position in the Indies, and were increasingly associated with poverty and

66 Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942 (Amsterdam, 1995): 165. 67 Taylor (1983): 16–7, 131, 157. 68 Gouda (1995): 114.

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delinquincy in the colonial imagination.69 Evolutionary theory became embedded in European systems of knowledge as a tool with which to distinguish between races. The Lamarckian paradigm, though scientifically inaccurate, remained the most popular in the colonial context.70

In their capacity as social and biological reproducers, women who were beyond the margins of easy racial classification were a particular indicator of the miscegenation of the Dutch population and its cultural values in the Indies. The colonial state legislated deterrents for the contemplation of European women who might entertain the notion of deviating from their role as guardians of the colonial order. In 1898 Dutch women who chose indigenous husbands gained the legal station of their partners — with all the attendant decline in social rank that ‘Native’ status implied — even if the couple settled in the Netherlands.71

In this context of growing racial regulation in the Indies, it is perhaps no surprise that in Couperus’ The Hidden Force it is a Dutch woman who remains true to her preference for Europe’s landscapes, and who is thereby represented as retaining her cultural and moral integrity. Those around her — a European man, and a Creole woman — allow themselves to become immersed within tropical landscapes and inter-racial relationships, and consequently forfeit their ‘Dutchness’.

The Hidden Force concerns itself with the demise of Resident Otto van Oudijck, a high-ranking Dutch official, after a series of mysterious hauntings in the fictional Javanese town of Labuwangi. Van Oudijck is not on good terms with his Javanese counterpart in government, the Regent (bupati) Sunario, whom he thinks of as ‘merely a fanatical

69 Gouda (1995): 112–3. 70 Gouda (1995): 128–9. Ann Laura Stoler has cited an instance in 1907 when a Dutch doctor in Java declared that blijvers (‘stayers’, or people who were ethnically Dutch, long-term residents in the Indies) were in danger of being literally transformed by the degenerative climate into natives — Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34(3), July (1992): 534. 71 The convention was that women followed their husdands’ legal status. Therefore, Indonesian women who married European men gained European status —Stoler (1992): 543; Gouda (1995): 168.

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Javanese who always shrouded himself in mystery ... He found him impractical: a degenerate Javanese, an unhinged Javanese fop!’72 Van Oudijck’s opinion of Sunario’s brother, the Regent of Ngadjiwa, is even less charitable. When the latter disgraces himself in a rowdy show of public drunkenness, Van Oudijck makes the grave decision to have the Regent of Ngadjiwa dismissed from office, thereby curtailing the already uncertain privileges of the local aristocracy and bringing shame to Sunario and his family. After the Regent’s dismissal, his family’s discontent sparks rumours of a rebellion and breeds insecurity among the Europeans in Labuwangi.

Meanwhile, trouble is brewing in Van Oudijck’s own household. His lascivious wife Leonie, a Dutchwoman raised in the Indies, occupies herself with seducing her step-child Theo, Van Oudijck’s son by a previous marriage to a Eurasian woman. Leonie adds insult to this quasi-incestuous relationship by pursuing her step-daughter’s love interest, a young Eurasian man by the name of Addy de Luce. The immorality of Van Oudijck’s family, together with his disrespect for the traditional authority of the local rulers, unleashes a succession of terrifying ‘hidden forces’ against him and his household.73 The hauntings in Couperus’ novel culminate in a chilling episode in the bathroom, where Leonie’s naked body is symbolically defiled by spatterings of sirih (beetle-nut) spittle from an invisible source. Soon after, the Resident’s family and household retainers flee in the wake of further mischief. It is not until Van Oudijck pays a menacing visit to Sunario’s mother that the ‘hidden forces’ cease their agitations and peace is restored.

At this juncture Van Oudijck the official has been triumphant, but Van Oudijck the man begins to unravel, as though all his energy has been spent on restoring the public order and nothing remains with which to resurrect his confidence in himself or his decadent family. In

72 Couperus (1982): 31–2 — ‘… alleen maar een fanatieke Javaan, die zich hulde in iets van geheim: … Hij vond hem onpraktisch: een gedegenereerde Javaan, een gedetraqueerde Javaanse gommeux!’ 73 These events were allegedly based on materials that Couperus collected during a stay with his sister and her husband, the Resident of Pasuruan, between March 1899 and February 1900. A report was given to Couperus by Governor-General Van der Wijck which detailed strange occurrences in the house of an Assistant Resident in Sumedang in 1831, events that were also witnessed by a General in the colonial army, AV Michiels — Beekman (1992): 21–2.

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making this realisation Van Oudijck parts with his stalwart Dutchness. He ceases to pursue advancement in the civil service, leaves his family to their own devices, and retreats to the hinterland with a young Sundanese girl and her kin, there to begin a new life. The symbolic victory of Java’s ‘hidden forces’ is thereby complete.

The Hidden Force continues to attract a great deal of scholarly attention, with interpretations of the novel differing widely. For example, Rob Nieuwenhuys argued that the occult ‘hidden forces’ inspiring the title amount to no more than literary props, present only as vestiges of the kind of fatalism that appealed to Couperus’ romantic sensibilities.74 Pamela Pattynama, on the other hand, has argued more recently that Leonie van Oudijck’s affairs, particularly with the Eurasian Addy de Luce, struck an uneasy chord with late nineteenth century Dutch audiences because they represented significant sexual and racial transgressions against colonial norms in a time when the rise of eugenics and discussions of racial degeneracy were becoming pressing intellectual concerns among European and colonial elites.75

The sexual dalliances of the Resident’s wife in The Hidden Force have arguably gained the most scholarly attention, perhaps because they still contain sufficient material to shock (or at least, to titillate) contemporary audiences. However, negligible attention has been given to one of the most significant relationships described in the novel, perhaps because it remained unconsummated — that between Van Helderen, a Dutch controleur (lower official) in the local administration, and Eva Eldersma, the wife of Van Oudijck’s overworked secretary. Van Helderen, a married man, is attracted to Eva’s sophistication and sensitivity, and yet the two fundamentally disagree on the nature of Dutch colonialism in Java. Born and raised in the Indies, Van Helderen feels secure and at home in its landscapes. For Eva, who pines for the distraction of the urban artistic and cultural life available to modern, well-to-do women in the Netherlands, making do in Java for the sake of her husband’s career is a daily struggle. She finds the colonial community in Labuwangi parochial, while the native population strike her as incomprehensible and frightening. The

74 Nieuwenhuys (1982): 128–30. 75 Pattynama: 99, 104.

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landscapes that surround her provide no relief from society. Indeed, tropical nature oppresses her. Throughout the novel Eva represents an important, if not hypersensitive, counterpart to Van Oudijck’s ignorance of his environment, and it is through her eyes that we often gain an insight into the true nature of the ‘hidden forces’ that seem to militate against Dutch elites in the Indies.

Alongside interpretations that focus on social relationships and racial transgressions, then, there is need for further development of a notion only mentioned in passing by most scholars:76 that Couperus’ ‘hidden forces’ were symbolic of a Dutch belief in the physical and metaphysical mutual exclusivity of East and West (or North and Equator, in this case), such that tropical nature itself convulsed at the trespass of Europeans.

The animate forces of Indies nature, jealously guarding the interests of its native children against the plunderous invasions of progeny from a foreign cradle, is a notion with mythological connotations that Couperus may have borrowed from syncretist Javanese culture, where ancient animist beliefs are combined with contemporary forms of Islam. This represents another form of dualism that may have appealed to Couperus and that possibly troubled his fellow colonists as they sought to come to terms with their perceptions of themselves as foreign Others among Indonesians and their homelands.

Couperus’ main characters in The Hidden Force are effective mouthpieces for Dutch and Javanese attitudes (in some cases, archetypal) toward nature and landscape in the Netherlands Indies. These attitudes were not only in keeping with general aspects of his characters’ personalities, but also with their sense of racial identity. For Sunario, the Regent of Labuwangi, nature is animated by spirits and powers that could be unleashed upon those who infringe traditional, indigenous concepts of cosmic order. Indeed, in Couperus’ view, Sunario’s intimacy with nature stems from two sources: from his being ‘native’, and therefore having an innate relationship with his surroundings;77 and from his status as the

76 See Beekman (1996): 283; Pattynama: 99; and Aldrich: 120. 77 See also Gouda, who noted that many Dutch believed that Indonesians had a mystical connection with nature that westerners had lost due to their sophistication. Indonesians were also assumed to have a wildness

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local spiritual leader which, as a nobleman, is his divine vocation. This gives Sunario the ability to harness those aspects of nature that are unknown to or even denied by Europeans. A character such as this ‘is conscious of the quiet force; he feels the mystery born upon the seething winds of the mountains, in the stillness of the secretive nights, and he foresees distant events’.78 There is of course a racialist implication to this viewpoint: it implies that, while the Javanese may commune with the obscure forces of nature, they cannot necessarily know themselves. Both of these states are ascribed to the ‘native’s’ lack of sophistication relative to the Dutch, the latter having lost many of their baser instincts and gained the higher faculty of reason on the path to civilisation.

Van Helderen, who has never been to Europe, thinks of Java as his homeland and is comfortable in his surroundings. While ‘pure’ Dutch descent has secured him a privileged position in colonial society, he is critical of colonial rule for economic gain alone and advocates an ethical approach to government in the Indies. Van Helderen is well aware of the reasons why the local population at times may resent Dutch rule. He tells Eva:

The reality is not a great ruler in the Indies, but a small, mean-spirited extortionist; the land is sucked dry, and the real population — not the Dutch, who spend their Indies money in the Hague; but the people, the Indies people, bound to the Indies soil — is oppressed by the disregard of their overlords, who once gave of their own blood for the benefit of the people. But now the people threaten to rise up against oppression and disdain … You, artististically, feel the danger approaching vaguely, like a cloud, in the sky, in the Indies night; I see the danger as something entirely real arising … from out of the very soil of the Indies.79

within themselves that the Dutch had managed to refine out of existnce — Gouda (1995): 119. 78 Couperus (1982): 96–7 — ‘ … hij voelte het mysterieus aandonzen in de ziedende wind van zijn bergen, in de stilte der geheimzwoele nachten, en hij voorgevoelt het verre gebeuren.’ 79 Couperus (1982): 63 — ‘De werkelijkheid is niet: de overheerser groot in Indië, maar de overheerser kleine armzielige uitzuiger; het land uitgezogen, en de werkelijke bevolking — niet de Hollander, die zijn Indisch geld opmaakt in Den Haag; maar de bevolking, de Indische bevolking, verknocht aan de Indische grond, — neergedrukt in de minachting van de overheerser, die éens die bevolking uit zijn eigen bloed verwekte — maar nú dreigende op te staan uit die druk en die minachting … U, artistiek, voelt het gevaar naderen, vaag, als een wolk, in de lucht, in de Indische nacht; ik zie het gevaar al heel werkelijk oprijzen … uit Indië’s eigen grond.’

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Here Van Helderen has hit upon a fundamental distinction between what he deems a ‘natural’ response from the Javanese toward Dutch misgovernment and what Eva expects from a people who, according to her, are self-evidently inferior to the Dutch. To Eva, the insubordination not only of the Javanese but of their very soil against Dutch authority is ‘unnatural’ (perhaps even super-natural). To Van Helderen, on the other hand, it is organic and (almost) as understandable as if the Dutch were to revolt against unjust rule in the Netherlands. To imperialist ‘old hands’ like Van Oudijck such sympathies were out of the question, as were all reservations about colonialism. Van Oudijck assumes an arrogance that stems from his belief in himself as an invincible Dutchman, and ‘he found it ridiculous, the notion that there were peoples who had more control over these [hidden] forces than the Westerners.’80

Eva Eldersma is more receptive to these ‘hidden forces’ than her male compatriots, and the anxiety that she feels amidst Java’s landscapes is one of the factors that determines her ultimate return to the Netherlands. It is through Eva’s eyes that we witness the occasional paranoia of those colonists who felt themselves unwelcome strangers in Java. Being surrounded by nature makes Eva, a city girl, profoundly uncomfortable, and consequently the place in which she feels most at ease in Java is at its metropolitan centre, Batavia. By European standards the colonial capital is little more than a provincial town, but to Eva its neat separation of nature from culture represents a welcome respite from the claustrophobia induced by her surroundings in the provinces. Eva never really adapts to the changed lifestyle that residence in Java requires. In Labuwangi ‘she felt her house, her spacious house, was small and open and defenceless against the immense Indies night, which could enter from all around.’81

80 Couperus (1982): 110 — ‘Dat er volkeren zijn, die ze meer beheersen, die kracht, dan de Westerse, zou hij bespotten.’ 81 ‘… zij vond haar huis, haar ruime huis, klein en zo open en beschermingloos voor de immense Indische nacht, die van overal binnen kon komen’ — Couperus (1982): 164. Frances Gouda has also made the observation that Dutch women often resented the open structure of Indies houses because it made them feel exposed and defenceless — Gouda (1995): 185.

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Late colonial architecture suggests that Eva’s view of tropical living was shared by others. In the early twentieth century Europeans living in Batavia began to abandon the spacious, airy houses that they had constructed for themselves in previous centuries in favour of smaller buildings and heavier furnishings more suited to the European cities that they were attempting to emulate.82 Rudolph Mrázek has noted that in the late nineteenth century the Dutch were reverting to increasingly cloistered, fusty architectural styles, more in line with the buildings of seventeenth century Holland than with the requirements of the tropics. Mrázek refers to this trend as ‘a technology for how to get across the ocean, on the foreign shore, and not to notice’.83 Colonial houses, Mrázek has argued, often had a temporary appearance, much like a hotel, because nobody expected to stay in the Indies for very long by the early twentieth century.84

Significantly, Eva’s terror at Javanese landscapes is often bound to her sense of alienation from the local population. She confides in Van Helderen that: ‘ “I am sometimes afraid. Here I always feel ... on the point of being overwhelmed, by what I don’t know: by something out of the ground, by a force of nature, by a secret in the soul of these black people, whom I don’t know.” ’85 The perception of differences between climate and landscape in Holland and Java cause such a homesickness in Eva — and such a loathing for the Indies – that she falls into a deep depression. During the monsoon season she perceives senseless destruction all around her caused by the brutal rains and humidity. It leaves her dispirited, erodes her sense of security and, perhaps most importantly, undermines her sense of herself as an indomitable European.

Day by day, inexorably, something perished, something rotted away, something grew mouldy or rusted. And the whole aesthetic philosophy which she had first used to learn about the Indies — to

82 Susan Abeyasekere, Jakarta: A History (Singapore, 1987): 115. 83 Rudolph Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton and Oxford, 2002): 64, 74. 84 Mrázek: 84, 135. 85 ‘… Ik ben hier soms bang. Ik voel mij hier altijd … op het punt overweldigd te worden, ik weet niet waardoor: door iets uit de grond, door een macht in de natuur, door een geheim in de ziel van die zwarte mensen, die ik niet ken …’ — Couperus (1982): 129–30.

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value the good in the Indies, to search also in the Indies for the beautiful line, externally, and the inner beauty of the soul — was no longer able to withstand the streaming water, the cracking apart of her furniture, the staining of her gowns and gloves, all the damp, mould, and rust that ruined the exquisite environment she had designed and created around herself, to console her for living in the Indies.86

Couperus seems to suggest that even if there was no occult ‘hidden force’ in Java, the intensity of nature was of a magnitude that militated against any ‘real’ European ever being at ease in the country. Indeed, Eva always felt that ‘there was in her house an Eastern resistance against her Western ideas. It was always a struggle not to surrender to lassitude, to let the grounds go wild’.87 In the depths of her despair, Eva makes the shocking suggestion that perhaps Europeans should surrender to such temptations and ‘go native’, thereby committing the ultimate betrayal against the tenets of European respectability.88

To everyone’s surprise, however, it is the novel’s robust Dutchman who ultimately follows Eva’s advice. Van Oudijck begins to concede the existence of insidious powers when finally confronted with the increasingly blatant indiscretions of his wife. It is only then that he becomes ‘insurmountably superstitious, believing in a hidden force that lurked he knew not where, in the Indies, in the soil of the Indies, in a profound mystery, somewhere, somewhere — a force that wished him ill because he was a European, an overlord, a foreigner on this mysterious, sacred ground.’89 Significantly, Van Oudijck remains

86 ‘… Dag aan dag, onverbiddelijk, bedierf er iets, rotte wat weg, beschimmelde, verroestte er iets. En geheel esthetische filosofie, waarmede zij eerst zich geleerd had van Indië te houden, te waarderen het goede in Indië, te zoeken ook in Indië naar de mooie lijn, uiterlijk, en naar het inwendige mooi, van ziel, was niet meer bestand tegen het stromen van het water, tegen het uit-een kraken van haar meubels, tegen het vlakkig worden van haar japonnen en handschoenen, tegen al de vocht, schimmel en roest, die haar bedierf haar exquise omgeving, die zij om zich heen als troost had ontworpen, geschapen, als troost voor Indië.’ — Couperus (1982): 125. 87 Couperus (1982): 125 — ‘… maar toch voelde zij in geheel haar huis een Oosterse tegenstand tegen haar Westerse ideeën. Het was altijd een strijd, om niet onder te gaan in het-maar-laten-gaan, in het maar laten verwilderen van het grote erf …’. 88 Couperus (1982): 129. 89 ‘[Hij werd] onoverkomelijk bijgelovig, gelovende aan een stille kracht, die school waar wist hij niet, in Indië, in de grond van Indië, in een diep mysterie, ergens, ergens — een kracht, die hem kwaad wilde, omdat

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incapable of making his wife responsible for her own actions, preferring instead to blame the tropical environment, as though Leonie’s moral laxity were the direct result of the languorous climate. By the same attribution — the wretched influences of the tropical landscape on colonial order — Van Oudijck avoids crediting Sunario and his followers for causing the political mischief that unsettles the European population of Labuwangi. The triumph of the Javanese climate over his constitution becomes Van Oudijck’s scapegoat for all his troubles. ‘What had become of his ambition?’ he asks himself. ‘How was it that his ambition for power had lagged so? He thought it was all due to the influence of the climate. It would certainly be a good thing to refresh his blood and his spirit in Europe, to spend a couple of winters there.’90 Van Oudijck does not, however, return to the Netherlands. Instead, he surrenders to the same impulse for submersion that he might have condemned his wife for, retreating to the hinterland with a young Sundanese woman.

In Van Oudijck’s misattribution of his personal misery to the vagaries of an inert climate, Couperus explored a deeper inability among Dutch colonists to grasp the true nature of their alienation in the Indies. In their dealings with Asians, the Dutch were not to blame for any failings due to their own ineptness or insensitivity, nor to the strength of indigenous resistance to colonial rule, both of which (if conceded) might fatally undermine the Dutch imperial project in the Indies. Instead, responsibility for defeat was attributed to extraneous factors — in this case, climate and landscape — that were beyond human control. Thus were the shortcomings of the colonial civilising mission explained, along with failed Dutch attempts to govern their own uncouth behaviours beyond the strictures of European society. In the eyes of his natal community, Van Oudijck has been enervated, sapped of the energy to fulfil his European brief of governing while remaining separate from his subjects. Removed from his European enclave he has, in both body and spirit, ‘gone native’, submitted to the power of the Javanese environment. So utterly transformed by the landscape is Van Oudijck that he can no longer entertain the possibility of returning to

hij was Europeaan, overheerser, vreemdeling op de geheimzinnige heilige grond.’ — Couperus (1982): 172. 90 ‘Waar was zijn eerzucht gebeleven? Hoe was zo zijn heerszucht verslapt? Hij dacht, het was alles invloed van het klimaat. Goed zou het zeker zijn als hij zijn bloed, zijn geest verfriste in Europa, en er een paar winters doormaakte.’ — Couperus (1982): 176.

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Holland. ‘ “In Holland I would not be able to withstand the climate anymore, or the people” ’, he tells Eva. ‘ “Here I find the climate congenial, and I have withdrawn from society.” ’91

As a fallen man, Van Oudijck can no longer return to his country of origin. However, this option is still open to Eva, who has retained her European integrity by resisting the temptations of Javanese nature. Her return to the Netherlands represents an action that is right and natural for a consummate European who, unlike her Indisch counterparts, is unable to adapt to the rigours of a profoundly foreign environment.

Thirty years after The Hidden Force was published in the Netherlands a similar character to Couperus’ Eva, one with an almost identical response to Indies landscapes, appeared in a novel by Madelon Lulofs entitled, simply, Rubber (1931). Despite (or perhaps, because of) the controversy it aroused the novel was a great success. It was reprinted several times, translated into German, English and Swedish and eventually made into a stage play and a film.92 The novel focused on the fortunes of the white staff — a motley assortment of people from all over Europe and America — on Tumbuk Tinggih, a fictional rubber estate on the east coast of Sumatra. We receive much of our introduction to plantation life through the eyes of its two newest arrivals, Frank and Marion Versteegh. In time, both become familiar with (though never entirely accepting of) the rhythms of plantation life. Throughout the novel the Versteeghs remain principled and industrious, traits which ultimately go unrewarded: at the onset of the Great Depression Frank is made redundant and, without having saved as much as they intended to, the Versteeghs are forced to return to the Netherlands.

The daily trials and tribulations of the white inhabitants of Tumbuk Tinggih are punctuated by two recurring events: extravagant nights out at the social club, and the perceived threat of injury or death at the hands of discontented coolies. The social club is where the white

91 ‘In Holland zou ik niet meer kunnen tegen het klimaat en niet meer tegen de mensen. Hier is het klimaat mij sympathiek en van de mensen heb ik mij teruggetrokken.’ — Couperus (1982): 200. 92 Publisher’s Foreword to Madelon Lulofs, Rubber (Oxford, 1991): iii.

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‘assistants’ from the plantation venture once a fortnight in order to flirt with one another’s wives and drown in their cups. It is where intrigues are hatched so that one man might gain professional advancement over another, and where vast sums of money are squandered on imported luxuries such that even the colossal bonuses that planters stood to earn in times of glut could barely suffice to procure enough celebratory drinks for the next round.93 Such nights of abandon were pursued with an urgency whose object was to seek oblivion from the daily grind of duties associated with being a planter or, indeed, his wife. Perhaps there was also a desire to mask the fear that any given night at the club might be a planter’s last. Violence features prominently in Rubber from the outset. First an assistant on a neighbouring plantation is killed. Later, a young Dutchman at Tumbuk Tinggih itself falls victim to the malice of a recalcitrant coolie run amok. In the novel, the assistant’s stabbing is portrayed as unprovoked and is later evaluated as inexplicable. Not surprisingly, the bereavement of the assistant’s young widow is portrayed with a great deal of sympathy. However, Lulofs gives little consideration to the oppressive system that defined a coolie’s conditions of labour in 1920s Sumatra, and she disregards the historical fact of brutal punishments that were sanctioned by a separate penal code.94

Lulofs was characteristically more sensitive to the private lives of the European women on the plantation than she was to systemic aberrations on the estates. This was particularly true with respect to her portrayal of Renée, a young and fashionable Dutchwoman who enters into a marriage with a planter named John Vanlaer. Renée quickly tires of plantation life and soon takes to seeking diversions. An emotional void is filled when she meets Ravinsky, a charming Russian planter whose reputation as a ladies’ man does not prevent the two from forming a genuine attachment to one another. Their affair culminates in a tryst in the mountain resort of Berastagi, where their relationship is consummated. Shortly afterwards

93 Leonard Y Andaya has noted that this pattern of Dutch behaviour in the Indies was the reverse of the frugality and sobriety that would have been expected in the Netherlands. In the seventeenth century, double standards characterised Dutch behaviour abroad. For instance, the philosophy of mare liberum in Europe and monopoly trade in Asia, and republicanism at home and despotism abroad — see Leonard Y Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (Honolulu, 1993): 41–2. 94 See Breman (1990); Stoler (1995); and Kian-Wie Thee, Plantation Agriculture and Export Growth: An Economic History of East Sumatra, 1863–1942 (Jakarta, 1977).

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Renée confesses all to her husband. The two separate, and Renée returns to Europe with Ravinsky. Echoes of Lulofs’ own elopement with Szekely? —very probably. More importantly, it is the Dutch wife Renée who evokes parallels with Couperus’ Eva Eldersma.

It is by no accident that Renée begins to unravel in the highlands, for it is here that she is reminded most profoundly of her alienation. At first glance this may be surprising. Mountain retreats were lauded for the invigorating qualities of their cooler climes, and were widely sought as natural remedies for exhausted Europeans in the tropics. Hill stations replete with luxurious hotels became common in Sumatra’s highlands during the late nineteenth century, much as they already were in Java and in other parts of the colonial world.95 The landscapes of these hill stations were transformed to suit European aesthetic and culinary tastes. Gardens displayed European flower varieties and boasted continental fruits and vegetables. In Lulofs’ novel, this mountain landscape is described as a place of great beauty, where the Dutch appetite for ‘views’ is satisfied in abundance.96 Indeed, nowhere else in the novel does Lulofs indulge in more lyrical descriptions.

Renée feels instantly invigorated at the mountain restort, and ruminates that humans can only truly hope to thrive in temperate climes such as these. She even fancies that variations in temperature between the highlands and the plain also account for differences in the temperaments of the Batak tribes local to the mountains and the ‘Malays’ who live on the lowlands.97 In time, however, Renée’s enthusiasm for the highlands subsides: after all, they are only a poor substitute for the ‘real’ thing back in Europe (although obviously not in the horizontal Netherlands, so we must assume that Renée has had the privilege of travelling to other mountainous countries on the Continent). While Renée’s tendency to compare Sumatra to Holland is probably natural for any expatriate, she expressed a fundamental unwillingness to appreciate the beauty of Sumatra’s highlands for their own intrinsic value: ‘Maybe she was homesick for Holland, for Europe. For however glorious the climate in the hills might be, it was still the Indies. All that to-do in the hotel, it was all luxurious,

95 See the discussion of colonial mountain retreats in Chapter 2. 96 See, for example, Lulofs (1933): 209–10. 97 See Lulofs (1991): 216.

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fashionable. It remained imitation … It was, it remained, the tropics! It failed to approach the authentic reality [of Europe].’98

Part of Renée’s disappointment with Sumatra’s mountains seems to stem from a deep-seated unease, perhaps even anxiety, about the scale of this landscape and the consequently diminutive status that it bestows on human life and society, which are of such importance to her. As narrator, Lulofs suggests that such vast landscapes are not for everyone, particularly for sophisticated Europeans who have long been separated from such ‘primitive’ sites of grandeur:

Renée gazed around herself and shuddered. She felt herself too small, too diminutive and civilised to cope with the stately majesty of this primitive landscape. A wild scream awoke in her: the cry of a refined person, who screamed for the protection of her civilisation; who had become too distant from primitiveness even to defend herself, and who could only exist within a community. A desolate fear of being alone welled up within her, and as she raised her arms in despair something in her cried: Away from here! Europe! City! People! Traffic!

Away from here, where the whole sky oppressed her with its weight, and where the earth would not receive her.99

In the last line of this passage Renée seems not so much to be rejecting this landscape as being rejected by it, a notion not unlike the profound sense of alienation that is experienced by Couperus’ Eva Eldersma on Java, despite its population density and shrinking wildernesses. Eva’s return to Europe might not have been marred by infidelity, as Renée’s

98 ‘Misschien had ze heimwee naar Holland, naar Europa … Want hóe ook, al wás het klimaat heerlijk hier … het blééf Indië! Al dat gedoe in het hotel, al wás luxueus, mondain … het blééf namaak: … Het wás, het blééf, de tropen! Het miste de échte, de oorspronkelijke werkelijkheid.’ — Lulofs (1932): 209. 99 Lulofs (1931): 210 — ‘Renée keek om zich en huiverde. Ze voelde zich te klein, te geciviliseerd nietig, om deze statige majestueusheid van de oerschepping in zich to verwerken. Een wilde kreet werd in haar wakker: de kreet van den beschaafden mensch, die schreeuwt om de bescherming van de civilisatie; die té ver is afgewaald van de oerstaat om zichzelf te verdedigen en alleen nog als gemeenschap kan bestaan. Een woeste angst voor dit alléen zijn joeg in haar op en terwijl ze haar armen in wanhoop hief, schreide het in haar: Weg van hier! Europa! Stad! Menschen! Verkeer! ‘Weg van hier, waar de heele hemel zijn gewicht op haar neerdrukte en de aarde haar niet ontving.’

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is in Lulofs’ novel, but both characters ultimately return to their land of origin because they simply cannot come to terms with, among other things, an Asian landscape that is strange and threatening to them. The implication is that both women harbour a steadfastly pure, incorruptibly Dutch identity that is incommensurate with and cannot be conquered by the overwhelming elements of Indonesian nature, and it is for this inflexibility that they are ultimately expelled — or choose to expell themselves — from the country’s very surface.

It is the men whom these women leave behind who exhibit the true racial degradation that must, following colonial logic, result from a Dutch person absorbing Indies landscapes into their identity. For Couperus, Otto van Oudijck’s decision to stay in Java while his friend Eva flees in the wake of ‘hidden forces’ represents the outcome of a too thorough acclimatisation through a loss of European self. Similarly, for Lulofs, the husband whom Renée leaves behind shucks off the new standards of post-marriage-ban plantation society by returning to a Japanese nyai with whom he had co-habited before his European fiancé arrived. While Lulofs describes this reunion without censorship or malice, many of her contemporaries in Europe were far harsher in their judgments of such living arrangements for Dutch men, particularly when these unions resulted in children. Along with accepting the frighteningly dense jungle bordering the plantation, the searing heat and the merciless sunlight that characterised life on the east coast of Sumatra, John Vanlaer accepted the conditions of a life that would have been regarded as improper and immoral by his Dutch acquaintances at home. Landscape and identity: the one went with the other, and the implication in these two novels was that those who surrendered to a foreign environment must also relinquish their very selves.

Inside/Outside — Shifting identities in an Indonesian landscape

It is fitting, perhaps, to use a traditional distinction between spaces in Indonesian cosmology100 to characterise a dominant concern in Maria Dermoût’s The Ten Thousand

100 The distinction between inside/outside in Southeast Asian and, specifically, Indonesian cosmologies is

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Things (1955), for it is a novel that traces the negotiation of inside and outside/public and private/European and Indonesian identities with reference to landscape in an old colonial family of blijvers. The novel is set in the early 1900s on Ambon in Maluku, once part of the famed ‘spice islands’ from which the VOC derived so much of its wealth and fame during the seventeenth century. As discussed in Chapter 2, by the early twentieth century the islands of Maluku represented an all but forgotten corner of the Dutch empire, overshadowed by more pressing concerns on the expanding geographical, political and economic frontiers of the colonial state. Small and pacific, Ambon had become a diminutive and domesticated comfort zone in Dutch views of the Indies, visited by painters and writers on pilgrimages of historical reflection upon another age in the Dutch colonial past.

In The Ten Thousand Things, we encounter a landscape that is presented far more sympathetically than Java or Sumatra were described by Couperus and Lulofs. Interestingly, given Louis Couperus’ penchant for aestheticism, allusions to beautiful Javanese landscapes were surprisingly rare in The Hidden Force. More frequently, Couperus used evocations of nature as a tool to illuminate the darker aspects of colonial life and its effects on the European population. Opportunities to discover beauty in the Indies seemed always to be thwarted by apprehensions that human life there was dwarfed by the relentless contest between extremes of nature.101 For Lulofs, similar observations might be made. Descriptions of majestic landscapes were usually countered by anxieties over the vastness and ‘emptiness’ of these vistas, and their resistance to European occupation. Dermoût’s descriptions, on the other hand, were written from the perspective of an insider, perhaps for others who had the same relationship to Indonesian landscapes. These were discussed with respect to textile design and function by Robyn Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia: Tradition, Trade and Transformation (Oxford, 1990): 93, 95. Textiles often reflect ‘the division of the world into two orders’, comprising of female, lower, left, moon, death and inside versus male, upper, sun, life, and outside. The same categories are discussed more generally by Hilda Soemantri in Visual Art: Indonesian Heritage (Singapore, 1999): 24–5; and Paul Michael Taylor and Lorraine V Aragon, Beyond the Java Sea: Art of Indonesia’s Outer Islands (Washington, DC, 1991): 34. 101 See, for example, the section beginning ‘Upon this morning world fell a cool dew’ in Couperus (1982): 145.

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places that were considered home, that were valued as a part of everyday lives and personal selves, and were remembered with mixed feelings because they were lost when the colonial period ended.

In The Ten Thousand Things the family Van Kleintje have been spice growers for centuries and have no inkling, of course, that within decades the Dutch possession of the Indies will be violently reliquished. The novel’s narrative structure derives from a series of murders on Ambon, which appear as separate chapters or short stories in the book. These vignettes come together at the novel’s end when the protagonist reflects on the premature death of her son — a death that she chooses to construe as a murder, even though it occurs during his service as a KNIL officer.

The narrative is often relayed through the eyes of Felicia, who begins life in the protection of parents grown rich from the proceeds of a Javanese sugar plantation, but who is abandoned with a small child by her husband when the family’s fortunes collapse. Felicia then decides to raise her boy Himpies (an Indisch variant of ‘Willem’) on Ambon, where she had spent part of her childhood. Himpies is brought up among the same comforts that Felicia enjoyed as a girl — the Small Garden, the bays, the hinterland, and most importantly, a Dutch grandmother whose Indo-European stories and beliefs have a lasting impact on the young boy.102 These influences trouble Felicia as her son grows older, for she fears that his identification with the indigenous world will prevent his successful integration into the European community that his Dutch ancestry has prepared him for. Although the hybrid society of Ambon is far removed from the censorious gaze of larger

102 Several biographers of Dermoût have emphasised the importance of Indo-European beliefs in her work. Nieuwenhuys (1982): 257, 259–60 discussed the prevalence of ‘animistic nature’ in Dermoût’s writing, and the fact that she was heavily influenced by the oral traditions that she encountered in Maluku. For example, she absorbed many of the stories told to her by her native housekeeper on Ambon. Beekman (1996): 478–9 also discussed Dermoût’s interest in sacred heirlooms in The Ten Thousand Things. However, Groen: 112–13, 115, 122 reminds us that Dermoût’s way of looking at the world still betrayed a ‘colonial mentality’ rather than an Indonesian one. For example, her use of Rumphius throughout The Ten Thousand Things represented the prevalent (though inaccurate) late colonial European view of Maluku as a static society where beliefs and lifestyles had not changed for centuries.

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European enclaves such as those in Batavia, Bogor or Medan, the Van Kleintjes are still Dutch and must maintain this identity in the presence of both Asian and European outsiders. European selves are displayed in public, when the steamship brings Dutch visitors, and when school friends come to play with Himpies. In private, in the sanctity of domestic spaces and kindred company, European selves are relaxed and affinities for local beliefs, peoples and landscapes are indulged. The regulation of this elastic repertory of identities becomes something that Felicia and her son often disagree over as Himpies grows older and forms his own ideas about which persona suits hims best.

The stereotype of the strong Dutch constitution ravaged by an enervating tropical climate is present in subtle doses throughout The Ten Thousand Things. For example, Felicia’s and her grandmother’s preferred costume, the sarung (wrap skirt) and (blouse), represent outward signs that the two women have ‘gone native’, and is one of the few instances in which they allow themselves to publicly identify with indigenous (or at least, Indo-European) culture. Jean Gelman Taylor has noted that, by the early twentieth century, native dress was considered by Europeans in most parts of the Indies as negligée.103 In this instance, then, identity was closely related to place and affinity. Felicia’s decision to adopt native dress seems to follow on from her sense that she belongs to the Small Garden rather than the town. ‘[I]n time the Garden won’, Dermoût tells us. ‘Her clothes lent a helping hand.’104 Further, when her mother dies, Felicia begins to undertake extensive expeditions over the island. The more Felicia immerses herself in the landscapes of Ambon, the more her European origins and interests seem to drop away from her.

Significantly, Felicia’s Dutch sense of self re-emerges in her role as a mother. As protector of her child’s future she must ensure that he is capable of assimilating with European society. When Himpies reaches school age Felicia begins to censor the superstitions surrounding the Small Garden that are kept alive by her grandmother. She laments the ‘distance’ (from the Netherlands) and lack of opportunity to ‘escape’ (from Maluku) that

103 Jean Gelman Taylor, ‘Official photograph, costume and the Indonesian revolution’ in Women Creating Indonesia: The First Fifty Years (Monash, 1997): 111. See also Mrázek: 137. 104 Dermoût (1959): 61 — ‘Op den duur won de tuin het. De kleren hielpen een handje mee.’

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life on Ambon entails for her son: ‘[T]he child, Himpies, she should not have brought him here, to the Garden so far away, abandoned by God and all people, and hemmed in on all sides: rivers, inner bay, mountains, and on an island — also hemmed in, ocean around it — nowhere a little path to escape along.’105 Having resigned herself to the loss of her own Dutchness, Felicia is desperate to preserve her son’s European character, and when Himpies resists the idea of going to the Netherlands to finish his education his mother admonishes him for desiring the very life that she has chosen for herself:

“Are you too indolent to study? Oh, I know, you’d rather stay and hang around the Small Garden. Be a little Indo man in pyjama pants and kebaya, sell eggs and milk, and spices that no-one wants to buy anymore! Look out for a woman with some money, certainly” — she had almost said ‘sugary money’ — “otherwise a plate of sago porridge and a fish from the bay, is that what you want?”106

In Felicia’s estimation her son has taken on too much of what is ‘native’ — a lack of ambition and vitality, and the absence of desire to improve one’s moral and economic circumstances.107 This desultory character has presumably been formed in the landscapes

105 Dermoût (1955): 65 — ‘ … het kind, Himpies, nooit had zij hem hierheen mee moeten nemen, naar de tuin zo ver weg, zo van God en all mensen verlaten, en afgesloten aan alle kanten: rivieren, binnenbaai, gebergte, en op een eiland — ook weer afgesloten — de zee er omheen — nergens een weggetje om weg te komen.’ 106 Dermoût (1959): 85 — ‘ “… ben je te lammelendig om wat te leren! O, ik weet ‘t wel, liever maar op de tuin kleyntjes blijven hangen! een Indisch meneertje woorden in een slaapbroek en kabaai, melk en eieren verkopen, en specerijen die geen mens meer kopen wil! eens uitkijken naar een vrouw met wat geld zeker” zij had bijna gezegd ‘suikeren geld’, “of anders een bordje sagopap en een visje uit de baai, wil je dat dan.” ’ 107 As explicated in Syed Hussein Alatas’ controversial The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London, 1977), where Alatas discussed the discourse of indolence that was adopted by Europeans describing some Asians in the tropics. Interestingly, Felicia’s attempts to rear Himpies as a ‘proper’ Dutchman is an example of the ‘masculine’ form that gendered colonial discourse adopted in its construction of natives as children, as identified by Frances Gouda in ‘The gendered rhetoric of colonialism and anti-colonialism in twentieth-century Indonesia’, Indonesia, 55, (1993): 5. It could be argued that Felicia adopts the rhetoric of fatherhood, rather than the ‘positive and sensitive’ metaphors associated with the motherly aspects of colonial discourse because, in the absence of a husband, she must be both father and mother to Himpies.

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of Ambon. As children, Himpies and his friend Domingoes firmly occupy the Small Garden:

He loved it in his own manner — without many ups and downs, just as it was — ordinary, as the garden had been these seven years for the two children, Domingoes and Himpies together. They had never stood and looked at the garden, they hadn’t seen that the Garden was ‘beautif u l’ and so frightfully far away and quiet! They had not seen anything to fear in the Garden. 108

The fleeting mention of fear here is developed as Himpies grows older.

He learned to be alone in the Garden — he could just stand still somewhere, his eyes wide open, and look, and see that the Garden was beautiful. He also saw things detached from one another, one by one: one tree, one rock, one flower, one shell on th e beach, one crab, one bird. At times he was afraid alone, not very, and he did not know what for.109

In this later stage of childhood, Himpies has begun to lose his sense of being encompassed by his surroundings. He stands alone and apart from a ‘view’ that he is able to appreciate from a stable vantage point and enjoy for aesthetic reasons, much the way that European painters of Indies landscapes ‘looked’ around themselves. 110

Himpies’ changing attitudes to the garden as he matures seem to parallel colonial notions of the proper development into an adult male. Accepting native cosmologies was permissible only in childhood. Indeed, colonial elites believed that European children and adult Indonesians had much in common, a prejudice with origins in the Enlightenment.111

108 Dermoût (1959): 81 — ‘Op zijn manier — zonder veel hoogten of laagten — zo als de tuin was — gewoon, zoals de tuin die zeven jaar lang was geweest voor de twee kinderen Domingoes en Himpies samen —. Zij hadden nooit naar de tuin staan kijken, zij hadden niet gezien dat de tuin ‘mooi’ was en zo vreselijk verweg en stil! Zij hadden de angst niet gezien op de tuin.’ 109 Dermoût (1959): 84 — ‘Hij leerde alleen te zijn op de tuin — hij kon wel eens ergens stil staan — zij ogen wijdopen — en kijken, en hij zag dat de tuin mooi was: hij zag ook de dingen los van elkaar, één voor één: een boom, een rots, een bloem, een schelp op het strand, een krab, een vogel — soms was hij bang alleen, niet erg, en hij wist ook niet waarvoor.’ 110 See the discussion on perspective in Chapter 4. 111 See Gouda (1993): 2, where he asserts that the tendency for Europeans to portray natives as children was

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Maturity was marked by adopting Dutch modes of seeing and ‘rational’ European belief systems. Colonial concerns for the plight of children who did not learn their proper place in colonial society manifested themselves in multiple anxieties in the late colonial era, particularly as the incidence of mixed marriage showed little signs of abating and children with one Indonesian parent threatened to undermine the ‘purity’ of the ruling classes.112 It was for this reason that some colonial elites suggested sending Dutch children to Holland for their education (as Felicia forces Himpies to do) so that they might be rescued in their formative years from the effects of the tropical climate and the pernicious influence of native servants, particularly with respect to sexual development.113 The importance of early intervention and ceaseless vigilance could not be underestimated since, as Couperus’ explication of the Van Oudijck family demonstrated, morally weak Dutch adults could not be relied upon to withstand the insidious tropical environment.

Himpies’ acquisition of a vague fearfulness of the Small Garden represents a crucial moment in his development of an adult Dutch identity. Is he frightened of the spirits that inhabit Indies landscapes because of a growing consciousness that such forces would represent an abberation of nature in European (Christian) belief systems? Is he perhaps repulsed by and afraid of himself for subscribing to notions that would be laughed at by his European schoolfriends? In short, are the indigenous beliefs in an animated nature that Himpies absorbed as a young child beginning to coexist uneasily with the ‘enlightened’ cosmologies that are part of a grown-up, Dutch education?

This would seem to be the case, for by the time Himpies reaches school age he has learned to keep these two aspects of his persona increasingly separate, possibly to avoid ridicule from his European friends. The garden, Himpies discovers, is a living thing that rejects his playmates: ‘By turns Dutch children from Himpies’ class came to stay; the Garden was not

common in the discourses of the Dutch, French, and British empires. See also Gouda (1995): 130–1; Stoler (1995): 141; Mrázek: 157. Mrázek suggest that the Javanese in particular were treated as children in part because they looked youthful to the Dutch. 112 Stoler (1992): 516. 113 Stoler (1992): 537.

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friendly to the new children; they got too sunburned there, in the water and again in the sun; they fell out of trees, had their feet stung by coral. One stepped on a sea urchin.’114 Upon his return from several years of schooling in the Netherlands, Himpies and his mother routinely conspire to keep their relationship with the Small Garden private in the presence of Dutch visitors from the town: ‘On such days the keys to the curiosity cabinet went missing — the books of Mr Rumphius; oh, they didn’t look in those. And who would ever risk talking to these new people about the coral woman in her flowered robe, who had been loved by Mr Rumphius?’115 Perhaps these things were concealed from the visitors because they involved personal memories, and perhaps it was also because these guests were outsiders, transients who thought of the Netherlands (certainly not sleepy Ambon) as home: ‘[T]hey didn’t see much in Maluku — it was too far away, one ship a month by which to leave — they longed for home, for returning to Holland.’116

By adulthood, Himpies has ostensibly absorbed a Dutch education, a fact that is attested to by his becoming a respected officer in the colonial army. However, it is uncertain to what extent Himpies has learned to reconcile the conflicting Dutch and Indonesian views of nature that he was exposed to throughout his life. It certainly seems that, privately, Himpies is never able to completely identify with Dutch views of Ambon. His own mother does not realise the full truth of this until she sees how happy Himpies is to be back at the Small Garden after a long sojourn in the Netherlands. On his first night home she hears her son whistling an old song from childhood in his room: ‘The song began with the words “watching from a distance”. Had he had such a very bad time’117 in the Netherlands? she

114 Dermoût (1959): 84 — ‘Daarna kwamen om beurten de Hollandse kinderen uit Himpies’ klasse logeren; de tuin was niet vriendelijk voor de nieuwe kinderen: zij verbrandden er te erg, dan weer in het water, dan weer in de zon, zij rolden uit een boom, strotten hun voeten stak an het koraal, één trapte in een zee-egel.’ 115 Dermoût (1959): 94 — ‘Op zulke dagen waren de sleutels zoek van de laden van het rariteitenkatje — de boeken van mijnheer Rumphius — ach, daar keken zij toch niet in. En wie zou het wagen tegen deze nieuwe mensen ook maar te reppen over de koralen vrouw in haar gebloemd baadje die mijnheer Rumphius bemind had?’ 116 Dermout (1959): 93 — ‘… dat zij niet zoveel in de Molukken hielden — en eens in de maand naar een schip om weg te komen, dat zij zo erg naar huis, naar Holland terug konden verlangen.’ 117 Dermoût (1959): 92 — ‘Het lied begon met de woorden — er uit de verte naar te kijken —

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wonders. For Himpies, then, the usual meanings for ‘home’ and ‘away’ are inverted: Ambon serves as his template for the natal landscape and the Netherlands represents the foreign environment.

The dilemmas of identity that result as Himpies moves between these two worlds seem to have become enshrined in Dutch memories of the colonial era. Himpies survives in the form of a wax effigy in the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, commemorated by a plaque that nowhere clarifies the fact of his fictional status.118 Perhaps his compartmentalised identity was something that resonated with those Dutch people who lived for long periods of time in the Indies, particularly after it had been removed from them as a second homeland by way of, firstly, independence from Dutch rule and secondly, Sukarno’s expulsion of Dutch people in 1957.

Before leaving this discussion of The Ten Thousand Things, it is worth making brief mention of the chapter entitled ‘The Professor’, one of the more poignant sections of Dermoût’s novel and one that counters the European problematic of landscape and identity with an Indonesian case. ‘The Professor’ tells the tale of Raden Mas Suprapto, the educated heir to an aristocratic dynasty in Central Java, and his apprenticeship to an eccentric Scottish academic whose enthusiasm for botany leads him to retrace the steps of Georg Everhard Rumphius in Maluku. Suprapto’s involvement with the professor, together with his distance from Java, lead to an identity crisis of the sort that was becoming widespread among educated indigenous elites in the late colonial period.119

‘Had hij het zo erg te kwaad gehad?’ 118 Noted on a field trip to the museum in April 2004. 119 See Heather Sutherland, The Making of a Bureaucratic Elite: The Colonial Transformation of the Javanese ‘Priyayi’ (Singapore, 1980): 132–3, 135–6. Sutherland argued that even in the early twentieth century, the Dutch still preferred to elevate the sons of bupatis to senior positions in the civil service, rather than considering educated lower-class Javanese for these positions. The nominal maintenance of an hereditary principle in the indigenous arm of colonial government contradicted the reduction of other traditional aristocratic priveleges, notably those to do with the exercise of independent power and sources of income. Sutherland summarises the resulting quandary for many Javanese elites in the late colonial period thus: ‘Bound by colonial constraints, unable to respond vigorously to economic and related social change, the

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On the one hand, Suprapto had been raised to cultivate and perfect the halus (refined) Javanese aristocratic persona. He respects this identity but also hates it for the confinement that it engenders, particularly in the guise of his cold surrogate ‘mother’ who expects him to conform to tradition when he assumes his inheritance. Suprapto’s craving for a different life is thwarted when his studies in Holland are cut short by his relative on the pretext that there is no money for their continuance. His role as assistant to the Scottish professor is the only one left to him before he assumes the duties of his rank. By the standards of the Javanese priyayi class, the professor’s manner is unrefined, and yet his sharp insights into Suprapto’s circumstances, together with his brilliant intellect, leave the latter unsure as to whether the professor would deserve all the criticisms that the Javanese of Suprapto’s class might heap upon him. On expedition one day, in Suprapto’s absence, the professor is killed by Butonese, and Suprapto must finally come to terms with what (and who) it is that he really values.

The landscape of Suprapto’s Java is inseparable from his heritage, identity and future. The portrait of the high-ranking aunt who has adopted him as her son reminds him daily of his duties as the heir apparent:

Suprapto looked at her, at what was behind her: The land — his land — Central Java, the Principalities …

As he looked at the portrait he knew that one day he would go back, he knew that she — ‘Sir Princess’ So-and-So, in travelling costume, and all that was behind her: plains, mountains, sky, palace, trees, people, the beautiful, dignified woman, temples, epic poems, dances, songs — this was his background, the foundation of his life; this was who he was.120 native officials of the late nineteenth century were an uprooted elite whose refined and over-elaborate cultural life was probably more a result of impotence than of specifically Javanese traits’: viii. 120 Dermoût (1959): 162, 163–4: ‘ keek naar haar, keek naar wat er achter haar was: ‘Het land — zijn land— midden-Java, de … ‘Als hij het portret voor zich had staan, er naar keek, wist hij dat hij op een keer terug zou gaan, dat zij — de heer Prinses Zus en Zo, in reistoilet en alles wat er achter haar was: vlakte, bergen, hemel, kraton, bomen, mensen, de beeldschone ebenburtige vrouw, tempels, heldendichten, dansen, liederen — zijn achtergrond

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Much to Suprapto’s initial chagrin, his eccentric professor is able to articulate the burden that this landscape symbolises for the young aristocrat:

All of us, always, must, when we are young, keep something for when we are old, but we let it go, and then we want to get away, and we draw a ship in the sand to take us to a new country, and we always forget the ballast — and there is no ballast other than the earth of the old country, and the earth of the new country is always just as heavy as that of the old. And for that we go away, over the seas, and sometimes drown along the way, in deep, deep water ... 121

The professor’s speech represents an intriguing inversion of the colonists’ journey described in Chapter 2 of this thesis and, though far from speaking for the Indonesians whom Dermoût’s countrymen had ruled, the difficulties that she delineates for Suprapto and Himpies suggest a dilemma over landscape and its relationship to identity that may have plagued many citizens of the Netherlands Indies, European and Asian.

G F

Being Dutch in the tropics was no straightforward undertaking. For some colonial novelists it represented a dilemma that animated the major narrative of their work. Certainly, these novelists rarely exemplified the mainstream of colonial society. Couperus and Lulofs in particular were, by virtue of their actions and beliefs, often distinguished from their Dutch fellows, and it is perhaps this alterity that enabled them to make such acute observations on the connection between European notions of self and Indies landscapes. One of the most profound paradoxes of Dutch colonial rule was the allocation of identities to landscapes

waren, de ondergrond van zijn leven — dat hij het zelf was.’ 121 Dermoût (1959): 167 — ‘… wij allen, altijd weer, moeten als wij jong zijn iets vasthouden voor het oud zijn en laten het vallen, en dan willen we weg en tekenen een scheepje in het zand om naar een nieuw land te komen en we vergeten altijd de ballast — en er is geen ballast dan de aarde van het oude land — en het nieuwe land heeft altijd even zware aarde als het oude land — en daarvoor gaan we dan weg, over de zeeën, en verdrinken soms onderweg! — in diep diep water …’.

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situated far apart — the Netherlands and the Indies — that, in a projection of the ideal colonial society, were constructed to be mutually exclusive. Some writers approached the consequent ambiguities of this paradox by writing characters who failed to accommodate themselves to the Indies environment, returning to Europe where they no longer had to worry about who they were because it was evident in the landscape around them. Alternatively, a writer could force his or her characters to give up Europe forever because they had betrayed the identity that was forged within Dutch landscapes. Couperus and Lulofs explored both these possibilities in their work. The final option for novelists was to create characters who manoeuvred between European and Native identities, and to investigate the ways in which these mutations related to Indies landscapes. This was Dermoût’s speciality, one that she even attempted to explicate in the guise of a Javanese character. How successful Dermoût was in this venture is perhaps the subject of another thesis.

292 Conclusion

This dissertation has extended the current literature on Dutch colonial painting and photography, which thus far has been mainly descriptive in its aims, to an analysis of the cultural discourses that underpinned the production of colonial art. During the period of formal Dutch rule over the Indies, between 1816 and 1942, colonial tastes with respect to landscape were cultivated as a set of historically and geographically specific preferences that were significantly differentiated by medium. These tastes were based on a set of thematic preoccupations and aesthetic conventions that had their origins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the VOC had represented Dutch interests in the region.

Throughout the colonial period, in literature, painting and photography, certain ideals came to predominate: those images of landscape that favoured the survival and prosperity of career colonists and the institutions that supported them — the expanding colonial state, the military, agribusiness, and trading conglomerates — were deemed beautiful and good, not just useful and lucrative.

A general predilection for cultivation over wilderness — for culture over nature — frequently informed Dutch views of the Indies. The preference for agriculture, settlement and the tendency to demonstrate political power through command over landscapes was something that colonial elites shared in common with Indonesian rulers, with the important exception of the pronounced Dutch aversion for wilderness, a landscape that occupied a special place in some indigenous cosmologies. Indeed, where Dutch views of Indies landscapes were most distinguished from those of Asians was in those scenes that colonial Conclusion

art and literature omitted: not only views of uncultivated lands, but also images of landscapes that were grudgingly shared with Asian farmers who used agricultural methods that competed with colonial interests; not only images of landscapes that hosted anti- colonial violence, but also of scenes that recorded any outcomes of colonial rule that resulted in historical discontinuity.

Colonial policy objectives, then, were often at odds with European artists’ views of Indies landscapes, the example of painterly silence on the colonial reorganisation of some communities to suit administrative needs being a case in point (see Chapter 4). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that conservation and sustainable exploitation — preoccupations of government and agribusiness that contemporary historians have explored with vigour in recent years — were barely a concern among colonial painters, photographers and novelists. The lack of Dutch interest in wild forest, or jungle, was of course reflected in the delayed protection of this kind of forest by conservation legislation relative to the protection of commercial tree stands. Dutch photographers, painters, and novelists, however, were not particularly interested in Indonesia’s forested landscapes. At best, such landscapes were viewed as disappointingly monotonous; at worst, as an oppressive nightmare — attitudes that were prevalent in colonial literature, and notable by their virtual absence in visual images of the Indies. Conservation, even of commercial forests, was not a pressing theme.

This is not to denigrate the value of conservation studies to our understanding of

Indonesian history. It is, however, important to emphasise that the current debate on the nature and impact of environmental regulations alone has not furnished a complete picture 294 Conclusion

of colonial actions in historical Indonesian landscapes; nor has it given an adequate voice to

Indonesian views of landscapes under colonial rule. One of the ways in which this thesis has begun to address this imbalance in the literature is through including sources that treat attitudes to landscape beyond the island of Java, which has been the traditional focus of institutional studies. My analysis subsequently included Dutch and Indonesian views of

Bali, Sumatra, and Ambon, among others.

The methodology adopted here — of searching art and historical literature for insights into cultural attitudes — has yielded some important insights into commonalities, as well differences, between the views of elites, Dutch and Indonesian, on landscape: an undertaking which, to my knowledge, has not been carried out by historians before now.

Art, it seems, assumed an important role in discourses of legitimacy among both groups.

Images that placed European and Indonesian rulers in authoritative positions within ordered, prosperous landscapes were common to both artistic cultures. Such views reinforced the supremacy of ruling classes, distinguishing them from commoners who were subject to the vagaries of nature. Indonesian rulers had their authority inscribed in art and literature that credited their agency with the transformation of nature into culture. Dutch rulers similarly placed themselves at the centre of tropical landscapes, even though, paradoxically, their presence was often erased. In other important ways, Dutch and

Indonesian visions of themselves as rulers over nature differed significantly. Although cultivated landscapes that supported human society were prefered by Indonesian rulers (and their subjects), wilderness sometimes occupied a special position in indigenous notions of kingship. On Java and Bali, mythical princes were prepared for rule by having their spiritual strength tested in the wild landscapes away from the palace and the countryside. 295 Conclusion

No such regard for uncultivated landscapes was harboured by Dutch colonists who, as demonstrated in Chapter 3, were keen to obliterate or ignore wilderness and wasteland.

In stylistic terms, of course, Dutch and Indonesian modes of representing landscape diverged considerably during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Europeans learned indigenous languages, adopted local forms of clothing, ate Indonesian food, and even married into Asian families; but colonial artists remained uninterested in experimenting with Indonesian modes of representation. This was all the more peculiar given that there were countless instances of Indonesian artists who absorbed western styles and techniques into their own repertory, notably the artists of Bali in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Javanese painter Raden Saleh in the mid-nineteenth century. Indonesia has a rich tradition of absorbing and transforming artistic influences from diverse cultural sources.

The character of Dutch colonial art, on the other hand, was conservative and curiously inward-looking, shunning even new trends in Europe. Its treatment of landscape remained consistent over a very long period of time, from the early nineteenth century until the mid- twentieth century. Between 1820 and 1920, European artists adhered to a view of Indies landscapes that favoured idyllic scenes of a lush, tranquil countryside virtually undisturbed by the great changes that colonialism in fact galvanised.

In the early twentieth century, some Indonesian artists were engaging in a political dialogue with a particular style of Dutch colonial art that, ironically, refused to acknowledge the political in Indies landscapes. The mooi Indië painting came under increasing attack from adherents to the emerging nationalist movement, specifically because such views of the

Indies were perceived as insidious vestiges of cultural colonialism. Pleasant views of rice 296 Conclusion

fields and villages nestled within majestic mountain valleys belied the violence of colonial rule, and the daily experiences of ordinary Indonesians living and working in less than idyllic landscapes — commercial plantations, factories, poor villages and urban slums.

Indigenous artists who were offended by these romantic images of Indies landscapes were sensible to a feature of colonial art that has been mostly overlooked by historians to date: it contained an intricate subtext beneath its ostensibly benign veneer, one that excluded

Indonesians from their own history and future in the interests of colonial self-preservation.

The journey embarked upon in Part I into the Indies landscapes that the Dutch were most familiar with begins to illustrate this gulf between colonial and indigenous views. From the seventeenth century, Dutch impressions of the Indies assumed their initial form aboard the deck of a ship arriving from Europe. Beginning with JC van Leur1 in the early twentieth century, historians have found this perspective to be a powerful metaphor with which to evoke the Eurocentrism of colonial scholarship and policy. The analysis conducted here of

Dutch painting, photography and travel literature proves that such imagery is more than an academic metaphor. Each new colonist arriving in the Indies did so in a mode that replicated the experiences of the Europeans who had come before them.

European entry into the Indies clearly involved a real physical journey that featured arrival upon a foreign shore. The Dutch heritage of art and literature on the Indies also, however, provided a cultural portal through which to enter the Indies. The coast assumed a

1 JC van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (The Hague, 1967). Note that Van Leur’s ideas had been known to readers of Dutch since the 1930s.

297 Conclusion

disproportionate importance in Dutch views of Indies landscapes. It was a landscape romanticised as the site of the earliest Dutch conquests in Asia, the source of great maritime wealth, and the glory of the Republic in the Golden Age of the seventeenth century. Coastal settlements gave Dutch colonialism a pedigree, a lineage, that superimposed the history and mythology of the United Provinces onto thin stretches of land wrapped around the equator.

Coasts were the umbilical cord that linked foreign, tropical landscapes to the metanarrative of Dutch history in colonial minds.

The first European trading posts in the Indies were perched upon these coastal fringes.

They became the heartlands of Dutch existence within and historical consciousness of the tropical environment. Views of colonial cities focused on the quarters frequented by

Europeans (and, to a lesser extent, Chinese), and therefore underpinned later nineteenth century attempts by the Dutch to segregate themselves from the indigenous population.

This was a project whose ultimate failure in the private sphere was due to a paradox: there was a long history of intermarriage and cohabitation between Dutch men and Asian women, and colonial propriety demanded that European households depend upon a coterie of native servants. Images of public spaces, however, maintained the fiction of racial partition: the conditions of Indonesians and Eurasians who lived in the poorer suburbs of colonial cities were rarely, if ever, pictured.

Coasts and colonial cities remained at the centre of European experience in the Indies, even if these landscapes were geographically and historically marginalised from Indonesian histories and mythologies. For the Dutch, coastal landscapes were a key component of the tempo doeloe narrative in colonial art and literature, a site of nostalgia for antique 298 Conclusion

landscapes and lifestyles. In places like Ambon, these landscapes remained frozen in time by painters and draughtsmen whose work was reissued throughout the nineteenth century, as well as by photographers, travel writers and novelists. It was not until Maria Dermoût’s

The Ten Thousand Things that a glimpse of the interior of Ambon was provided: significantly, it was from a character whose racial identity was ambiguous, part Dutch, and part Ambonese.

Colonial progress inland generally accompanied the expansion of commercial agriculture.

On Java, this took the radical form of the Cultivation System, which became renowned for its transformation of the economies of the Netherlands and of the Indies. The system was also responsible for the renovation of some Javanese landscapes: villages were reorganised, countryside deforested to make way for plantations and processing factories, and connective infrastructure was erected. The European emphasis on coastlines up until this point had marginalised alternate landscapes inhabited by Indonesians in the hinterland.

Java’s interior remained relatively unfamiliar to Europeans until the mid-nineteenth century. Sumatra’s highlands remained unknown to the Dutch until the late nineteenth century. In Europe, mountains had been regarded with aversion as wild landscapes until the late eighteenth century, when they first entered into the vocabulary of Romanticism. In

Indonesia, by contrast, mountains were central to notions of kingship and to indigenous cosmologies, and often hosted large populations. It was not until the nineteenth century that

Dutch colonists integrated highlands into their views of the Indies. Mountains and volcanoes were of great interest to scientists and scholars, and attracted Europeans seeking respite in a cooler climate. In the latter sense they assumed a similar function to the hill stations of the British Raj in India. However, mountains were never entirely domesticated 299 Conclusion

by Dutch colonists. Novelists writing in the 1930s, like Madelon Lulofs and Beb Vuyk, continued to portray mountain landscapes as oppressive and primitive. Ambivalent attitudes toward the highlands aside, photographers frequently celebrated the colonial push into the interior, showing many triumphant images of railroads and suspension bridges traversing mountain valleys. Novelists described the back-breaking labour (most of it performed by

Asians) of environmental transformation. Painters, however, arrived in the landscapes of the interior and refused to depict the structures that had brought them there, with the notable exception of the Great Post Road.

This differentiation of images by medium — where painters were the most inclined to idealise the Indies, writers the most likely to expose controversies, and photographers tended to occupy a position between these extremes — was a defining attribute of Dutch colonial landscape art, and a theme that recurs throughout this thesis. Colonial ambiguity over depicting plantation landscapes, described in Chapter 3, provides a case in point.

Photographers, with their association to science and technology, reported to government, business and scientific institutions on the progress of plantations. However, when photographers ventured into plantation regions with the purpose of compiling an album for dissemination among wider Dutch audiences, plantations were often omitted. These albums had, after all, entered into the realm of popular representation, and in this sphere the exoticism and tradition of Indies landscapes were the aesthetic of most interest to Dutch viewers. Plantations contradicted the painterly mythology of colonial non-intervention in

Indies landscapes that permeated government and scholarly discourses, particularly with reference to the village landscape. Painters preferred images of ‘traditional’ Indies landscapes — which, by definition, almost always excluded plantations — together with 300 Conclusion

views that Europeans considered unsightly and morally repugnant, such as wastelands and lands subject to shifting cultivation. These aversions were born of simple utilitarian concerns: woesteland (wasteland) was commercially useless, and shifting cultivators competed with colonial agribusiness for fertile regions. The aversion to the latter sort of landscape ran deep in colonial culture: novelists like Maria Dermoût, writing after the end of colonialism, continued to associate shifting cultivation with a lower order of civilisation, with the irresoluteness of nomadic culture, and with disorder. Shifting cultivators subverted colonial definitions of order in complex ways by threatening the Dutch ideal of intensive agriculture and sedentary, complicit populations, all of which supported the maintenance of the colonial state.

The explanation for this differentiation between views of landscape according to medium is a complex one which, as alluded to above, refers to the contours of colonial society as well as to sources of patronage. It was not until after 1870, with improvements to international transport and communications and the deregulation of immigration laws, that travellers with a painterly inclination could easily journey to the Netherlands Indies in order to seek artistic inspiration. Before 1870, most painters in the Indies were professional colonists who made a living from governance, agriculture, trade or the military, and who dabbled in oils and watercolours only in their leisure time. Those artists and draughtsmen who worked in the Indies in the first half of the nineteenth century were often employed by colonial institutions to accompany expeditions and other expansionary undertakings. These image-makers were therefore stakeholders in the colonial endeavour, and were unlikely to critique the source of their livelihood by depicting controversial aspects of Dutch rule.

Peaceful, prosperous, historically continuous landscapes, undisturbed by conflict and 301 Conclusion

unruffled by transformation — these were the views that painters were most inclined to represent. In the early twentieth century, when travelling artists arrived in numbers in the

Netherlands Indies, painters were only too disposed to be beguiled by the beauty and exoticism of the tropics: it was what they expected to see. This was also what international audiences were shown. Artists whose paintings were displayed at world’s fairs and colonial exhibitions in Europe were usually skilled in the popular mooi Indië genre, where purple mountains and smoking volcanoes, quaint villages and green valleys were the order of the day.

Perhaps the fact that many (though not all) Indies painters were amateurs who preferred to perfect their uncertain skills rather than engage with movements in contemporary art also informed the atavistic nature of colonial painting. Not so for photography which, from its inception, was associated in both Europe and Asia with empiricism and truth. Photography quickly replaced draughtsmanship as an aid to science and exploration in the Netherlands

Indies, and was therefore a popular tool of government and business. The association of photography with technology and modernity perhaps informed the celebratory, triumphalist nature of much colonial photography, which recorded those landscapes that were bypassed by painters, including plantations, factories, bridges, and other changes brought by colonialism. By the late nineteenth century, however, photography was also an important aspect of colonial nostalgia. Postcards and photo albums were major components of the culture of fetishising and remembering certain landscapes over others: those that colonists were most familiar with (colonial cities, plantation bungalows), and those that were most unusual or collectable (volcanic craters, caves and other curiosities). Both types of photography — empirical and souvenir — were determined by a market that, though varied 302 Conclusion

in its inclinations, nonetheless demanded images of landscape that were seen through Dutch eyes.

Writers, like painters, were not beholden to a broad colonial market. Their works were often unpopular at the time of their publication, and were more likely to find an audience outside the Indies than among colonists. Unlike painters, however, writers — by their own admission and according to the views of their biographers — were often less committed to the premises of Dutch colonialism than their contemporaries. Writers were a vitriolic breed who frequently took issue with the acquisitive, parochial concerns of mainstream colonial society, and sometimes loosed their ire upon colonial policies as well. By definition, many

Dutch colonial writers were misfits and malcontents whose very pursuit of literary fame

(rather than a civil service career or wealth gleaned from planting) differentiated them from their fellows in the Indies. While it is worth remembering that very few writers, if any, condemned colonialism outright, their views of Indies landscapes were often more nuanced and controversial than those of painters and photographers, not to mention the colonial establishment.

Qualitative differences according to medium aside, certain themes consistently emerge in

Dutch colonial art and literature that provide an intriguing insight into how images of landscape were crucial to justifying the maintenance and expansion of colonial rule. Part II of this thesis demonstrated how rust en orde, the official mantra of the colonial state, informed a wide variety of landscape images over a period of more than a century. Images of peace and order often married the Dutch preference for cultivated landscapes with the requirements of a small elite keen to maintain effective governance: the powers of 303 Conclusion

navigation, surveillance and control, and the appearance of complicity with colonial policies.

Ships had carried the Dutch to the Indies since the late sixteenth century, and even when aeroplane travel became a regular option for travellers in the early twentieth century, views of the coast and mapscapes of the kind that VOC merchants had fashioned were still used as templates in which to frame a first colonial experience of tropical landscapes. Mapping and taxonomy were part of this VOC legacy. In the colonial context, cartography and curiosity cabinets were the practical tools of colonial expansion that retained their daily use for practical reasons. However, mapping and taxonomy were also deeply embedded in

Dutch colonial culture as conceptual and mnemonic aids used to apprehend, translate and remember, through de- and re-constructing the varied, unfamiliar landscapes of the Indies.

On a small scale, the practical task of ordering occurred in colonial gardens all over the

Indies. Traditionally, gardens had been the preserve of elites in Indonesia, and the forms that they adopted among the European ruling classes formed a strikingly secular contrast to the ornamental gardens of indigenous aristocrats and religious authorities. The European garden in the Indies does, however, provide an insight into colonial cosmology. The containment of tropical exuberance, manifest in the ubiquitous flower pot, was an obsession among Dutch colonists, as attested to by sundry photographs and literary references to the phenomenon. Gardens of pot plants represented an attempt to control domestic Indies landscapes, particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when there were growing official and scientific concerns over the effects of social hybridisation. The resultant attempts at segregation, in society and in nature, met with limited success, as 304 Conclusion

demonstrated by the humorous accounts of some colonial observers who were amused at bourgeois European attempts to modify the Asian nature of their surroundings. A more authoritative vision of colonial order was that of the Buitenzorg palace in its botanical garden. This became an enduringly popular image of the Indies after its early picturing by

AJ Bik, one of the artists who was present when the gardens were founded. That the seat of government was associated with such a landscape was no coincidence: the gardens represented the ultimate symbol of order imposed on tropical landscapes, one that resonated particularly with the Dutch, who had a high regard for and long tradition of horticulture.

It was the colonial desire for order in landscapes above all else that ultimately triumphed, even above the misgivings that sceptical writers sometimes expressed at the environmental destruction that plantations were superimposed upon. Whatever brief doubts that planters may have entertained at the end of a day spent clearing old growth forest, these were invariably allayed at the sight of a new plantation, tidy bungalows, and a vision of order emerging before them. The development of modern infrastructure was a crucial component of the process of ordering, not only because it forged landscapes that were cosmetically similar to the Netherlands (and therefore evoked pride and nostalgia in colonists), but also because infrastructural development bolstered the image of Dutch colonists as benevolent rulers whose actions improved the living standards of indigenous people. Writers were crucial participants in a patriotic discourse that associated Dutch visions and endeavours in

Indies landscapes with rights to land that were earned through toil rather than inherited through race. Such claims to legitimacy became increasingly important after 1870, when the Agrarian Law forbade non-indigenous ownership of rural land, and in the early twentieth century, in the context of a growing nationalist movement that questioned the 305 Conclusion

very foundations of colonial legitimacy. The transformation of wilderness into order, then, was a cultural process for colonists as much as it was an economic imperative. In this sense, colonial elites were engaging in a similar discourse to their Indonesian predecessors when they converted forests into rice lands and wilderness into villages — with the crucial exception that colonial rhetoric and practice, of course, competed with indigenous claims.

The reality of Indonesian resistance to rival Dutch claims to land (and labour) contradicted the colonial penchant for peaceful landscapes. Artists and writers frequently expunged historical evidence of resistance and disorder from their images of the Indies. Landscapes in which wars were fought were sanitised, and sites subject to radical change were normalised in the interests of expressing a benevolent, non-interventionist Dutch presence — mythologies that had their political counterparts in the doctrine of indirect rule. Hence,

FVHA de Stuers’ recollections of the Java War focused on the restoration of order and the tranquil aftermath of the conflict, rather than on the proceedings of the war itself. Less tumultuous events were also selectively edited. Particularly at the hands of painters, agricultural landscapes and village scenes maintained a pastoral quality that denied the colonial promotion of export industries, the early marks of industrialisation, and the reorganisation of communities to suit administrative purposes. Such views of Indies landscapes were silent on the programs that defined and motivated Dutch colonial expansion, and the resistance that was often encountered along the way. The painterly preference for historical continuity in landscapes was also diametrically opposed to the images in Indonesian art, where the ruler’s presence underpinned the peace and prosperity of the land.

306 Conclusion

Painters were of course not alone in this odd preoccupation with historically static landscapes. Colonial scholars too were busy recognising, unearthing and restoring

‘traditional’ landscapes all over the Indies. These were processes that were by their very nature interventionist, and therefore inherently contradicted the myth of colonial non- interference. This was particularly true for colonial discourses on the indigenous ‘village’, a type of community that was busily constructed or restored by the Dutch wherever it was not found in evidence. Artists were complicit in maintaining the colonial notion of the village on Java and, particularly, on Bali, where painters like Walter Spies worked to unite the ancient past with the landscapes of the present. The Bali artists were often blind to the daily lives of the people whom they lived among, as attested to by the idyllic scenes that Adrien le Mayeur persisted with during economic depression and war (albeit in black and white rather than with the glut of colour that better times had furnished for him). The fiction of non-interference that was perpetuated in colonial art presumably fostered a sense of indigenous complicity with colonial rule, predicated on the provision of peace and prosperity to colonial subjects. The undisturbed tropical landscape was perhaps also an expression of deeply held colonial views on the history, complexity and viability of some indigenous societies. The notion that the traditional village needed to be ‘preserved’ against the rigours of encroaching modernity and its attendant forces, some of them beyond Dutch control (like nationalism and communism), no doubt informed the work of European artists on Bali.

The irony of European artists’ favoured views of rural life was that these landscapes were the sites where some of the most turbulent change occurred during the colonial period. In the countryside, for instance, landscapes were transformed, people were transported, and 307 Conclusion

societies were fundamentally changed — facts that one would hardly be cognizant of on perusing colonial views of working landscapes. Photography celebrated the rational production processes by which comestibles like tea, coffee, sugar and tobacco reached the tables of European consumers. Photography was also an extension of colonial surveillance mechanisms, in that it represented the maintenance of racially-based hierarchies and the maintenance of order in plantation society and its landscapes. Indeed, the two premises were linked: the orderly landscape of the plantation was a metaphor for the regulation of behaviours on estates. Colonial novels reinforced the importance of environment in colonial social life. For writers like Madelon Lulofs and Laszlo Szekely, the oasis of order that plantations represented in East Sumatra were a relief from the sinister jungle, which was associated with the errant behaviour of militant coolies. Painters, as ever, idealised agricultural labour, particularly traditional modes of subsistence cultivation. With few exceptions, painters were all but silent on large-scale commercial plantations, factories, and the mechanisation that often followed in the wake of colonisation. Peasant labour itself was often depicted devoid of toil or hardship. The distant view of the panorama aided in this foil.

Indeed, the panorama — a style of landscape art that reached its apogee in seventeenth century Dutch painting — acquired new meaning in the context of the tropics, where it was the favoured genre of painters and photographers. Planters and administrators were particularly interested in the topographical features of Indies landscapes. Further, there were many colonial artists with military training who employed the techniques of surveying and draughtsmanship and who were also disposed, perhaps unconsciously, to select perspectives that aided surveillance and navigation through landscapes. The colonial 308 Conclusion

emphasis on the panorama has few comparisons in the Indonesian art tradition, which privileged fine details and the ‘interiors’ of landscapes (being in the forest rather than looking at it from afar). An exception presents itself in the case of classical Javanese poetry, wherein kings and holy men often described landscape as though viewed from above. The demonstration of power and privilege was perhaps the common prerogative that united these culturally and historically disparate uses of the panorama in European and

Indonesian art.

In keeping with the ideals of peace and order, and in the absence of widespread

Christianisation, antique and living Hindu and Buddhist landscapes were favoured as the ideal sacred landscapes by colonists. To Dutch artists and scholars, Hinduism and

Buddhism offered an exoticism associated with Eastern religions that remained politically neutral and hence non-threatening to European Christians living in the Indies. Such views were fostered by Dutch (secular) authorities in opposition to the perceived menace of political Islam. The antiquities of Islam, and the landscapes that hosted Muslim populations, had their admirers among Dutch observers. Old mosques and Muslim graves were frequently pictured by Europeans, and natural landscapes in Islamic regions like

North Sumatra received their share of artistic attention. However, by the close of the nineteenth century, a distinct association between Islam and conflict had emerged through

Dutch literary and visual portrayals of the Aceh War — a connection that had been all but absent from colonial images of previous conflicts. Indeed, Michael Laffan’s compelling thesis on growing European concerns about Islamic militancy in the late colonial period2 is

2 Michael Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The ‘Umma’ Below the Winds (London and New York, 2003).

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supported by the sudden vigour with which colonial artists and writers linked Islam to unstable landscapes during the Aceh War, and the equal (and opposite) fervour with which colonists indulged the fantasy of an alternative, benign sacred ideal in the Indies.

On Java, artists relished the opportunities for historical and imaginative reconstruction that ancient temples proffered. Here the tropical landscape was portrayed either as a romantic backdrop to majestic ruins, or as tenacious verdure that needed to be stripped back in order to reveal a relic from the past. In images of the temples at Borobudur and Prambanan,

European empirical agency and industry were placed at the centre of narratives of discovery and restoration. While some artists appeared to muse in their work upon the past and present meaning of the temples within the context of their surrounding landscapes and societies, indigenous notions of the sacred — specifically, the Javanese concept of keramat, which values undisturbed sacred sites — seemed to have been disregarded by Dutch artists.

Indeed, it was the ostensible silence and mystique of these antique sites that most attracted colonists, who projected their own interpretations of histories and meanings upon such landscapes. Interestingly, the colonial fixation upon ancient relics is now increasingly shared by contemporary Indonesians.3 In the nineteenth century, by contrast, the natural features of holy landscapes — not just the monuments that they hosted — were more commonly imbued with sacred power.

Bali fostered the most fanciful creative approaches among the European artists and

3 John Pemberton, On the Subject of ‘Java’ (Ithaca and London, 1994); Kenneth Taylor, ‘Cultural landscape as open air musuem: Borobudur World Heritage Site and its setting’, Humanities Research, 10(2), 2003: 52-61.

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intellectuals who ventured there in the early twentieth century. The variant of Hinduism that colonists identified as being practiced on Bali seemed to illuminate aspects of Java’s pre-Islamic past, and therefore positioned Bali (in colonial views) as a living museum in ways that were commensurate with broader views of the island as an endangered cultural sanctuary. European observers marvelled (misguidedly, as it turned out) at the supposedly gentle art of worship on Bali and the inspiring position that tropical landscapes seemed to occupy in spiritual reflection. In European art, Balinese were portrayed as being linked to nature and to history in a perpetual loop, undisturbed by modernity, regional upheavals or internal frictions. In a pseudo-Christian slant on Balinese religion, tropical landscapes were represented as tranquil and meditative, encouraging the worshipper to quiet introspection.

Temples were relegated to picturesque silhouettes in this paradigm, with nature implicated as the greater church. Perhaps this was how the European artists felt about these landscapes.

However, their work also misrepresented indigenous modes of engagement with sacred spaces. As Hildred Geertz’s recent portrait of the life of a temple in Batuan suggests,4 in

Balinese art and culture nature is neither placid, empty nor contemplative, but rather unstable, filled with opposing tensions, and peopled with humans, gods and demons, both in the built environment of the temple where so many ceremonies occur, and in the processions through landscape that often follow.

Islam of course attracted its own measure of scholarly and artistic interest: image-makers recorded sites of worship and pilgrimage, and even experimented with architectural ideals, often settling for those that were derived from India and the Middle East rather than from

4 Hildred Geertz, The Life of a Balinese Temple: Artistry, Imagination, and History in a Peasant Village (Honolulu, 2004).

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indigenous precedents. This, however, was where colonial idealisations of Islam began and ended. The Islamic world in which Dutch colonists had placed themselves was vociferous, political, and, by the late nineteenth century, dangerous. From this time, scholarly and official interest in Islam moved beyond an intellectual curiosity in its sacred landscapes and toward the concerns of surveillance and control. The role of militant Islam in anti-colonial resistance was one that the Dutch were acutely aware of from the latter stages of the Aceh

War. Before then, Islamist elements in anti-colonial resistance, as in Java during the war of

1825–30, had been successfully expunged from colonial visual records. Peace, neutrality and secularity had been restored far more quickly to colonial views of Central Javanese landscapes than they were to Dutch views of Aceh half a century later.

The strength of Dutch fears over the prevalence of Islam in the landscapes surrounding them in the late colonial period was clear in literature, which expressed a sudden interest in the psychology of Indies Muslims, particularly those in powerful positions with radical inclinations. The work of Madelon Lulofs and Louis Couperus, discussed in Chapter 5, serves to illustrate this shift in attention. Particularly in Couperus’ The Hidden Force, it is the ubiquity of Islam — the notion of it surrounding the colonists — that most unnerved his

Dutch characters.

This brings us to the anxieties that formed the theme of Part III of this dissertation. Colonial literature, with its capacity for subtlety and nuance, comprises an important source in this section, which departs from those aspects of landscape that were associated with the Dutch maintenance and exercise of their elite status and investigates how colonial social categories were constructed relative to tropical nature. Previous historical studies of the 312 Conclusion

Netherlands Indies have touched on this aspect of colonial culture, but have failed to take a more comprehensive approach to the topic of landscape and colonial identity. To some extent, Part II of this thesis also contributes to an understanding of how Europeans

‘imagined’ themselves in the colonies, to paraphrase Stoler again. Artistic and literary views of Indies landscapes placed the Dutch in the position of ruling elites whose responsibilities involved the maintenance of peace and order; whose privileges included the extraction of tribute and agricultural exploitation; and, importantly, whose fears encompassed the loss of their status, or worse, safety, in the Indies. Insecurity and anxiety

— the fear of being foreigners in an alien and perhaps hostile environment — accompanied even the most optimistic and idealised Dutch views of Indies landscapes.

The seductive qualities of Indies landscapes formed an important component of Dutch fears about living in the Indies. Asian women were indelibly connected in colonial minds with tropical nature, but in a complex manner. For one thing, images of women were differentiated by class according to the way in which they occupied space, and some classes were deemed more closely connected to nature than others. European women and Javanese elites were pictured in ways that emphasised their respectability and status, but also subordinated them to the authority and intrepidity of their male counterparts. Commoner women were shown in more diverse modes. Indeed, they pervaded Indies landscapes more completely than upper class women. It was ordinary women, because of their more vulnerable positions in society, who were more likely to be subject to the so-called

‘colonial gaze’, with its tendency to objectify and fetishize. Indeed, colonial photographers and painters alike pursued a common interest in depicting native women bathing, often in public places where women had an expectation (though perhaps limited) of privacy. It was 313 Conclusion

the erotic association of native women with public, outdoor spaces that distinguished Dutch colonial artists from the French and British Orientalists, who tended to focus their imaginings on the domestic interiors that were forbidden to them in the Middle East and

North Africa. Dutch artists snatching their pictorial glimpses of women bathing in rivers or splashing in pools also contrasted with the association between women and bathing in

Indonesian art. Here such views were the prerogative of rulers who could summon both women and water to themselves to enjoy in private. In this sense, the public voyeurism of

Dutch colonial artists was exceptional, in both the European and the Asian contexts.

When the Dutch did concern themselves with interiors, they found Asian women there also.

Indeed, Asian women were part of many colonial households, something which aroused growing consternation among the colonial establishment from the late nineteenth century in the context of debates about European identity and the threat of racial miscegenation.

Historians have located some of the most contentious sites in colonial culture in the household and the body. Both these sites were of course connected within broader landscapes, which have been neglected by studies that have yielded otherwise important insights into the construction of racial and gender identities and the contours of private life in the Indies. Some examples from late colonial literature reveal that Europeans often felt besieged by the sensuality that was associated with the landscapes surrounding them in the

Indies. The sultry climate of the tropics was strongly identified with sexual promiscuity, particularly in native women, but it was also used (in The Hidden Force) to explain the actions of a European male who took a Sundanese concubine, as well as the behaviour of a

European woman whose many affairs included an interlude with a Eurasian. The case of

Leonie van Oudijck, one of the most lascivious characters in Dutch colonial fiction, 314 Conclusion

subverts the stereotype of the European woman sexually enervated by the climate of the

Indies.

Indeed, enervation was a common concern of Europeans living in the tropics. Responses to climate differentiated between different kinds of colonists. The distinction between newcomers and blijvers, or old hands, was often illuminated by attitudes to landscape.

Some of the fondest recollections of the Indies, such as Maria Dermoût’s Yesterday and

Marguerite Schenkhuisen’s Memoirs, were characterised by the authors’ genuine appreciation for the daily and seasonal rhythms of life in the Indies, which differed so dramatically from those of the Netherlands. Both Dermoût and Schenkhuisen had spent a large part of their lives in the Indies. Newcomers, on the other hand, were expected to suffer in the heat and humidity of the Indies in ways that old hands were inured against.

Perhaps this was another source of tension between these two groups in the late colonial period, when the status of Indisch colonists — those who had assumed some of the customs and manners of the Asians whom they lived amongst — became increasingly tenuous.

Those who had adapted well to the rigours of the tropical climate were suspected of assimilating other ‘native’ qualities, like indolence and immorality. Indeed, climate was an important component of a colonial discourse of environmental determinism that linked racial characteristics to nature. In this Lamarckian view of human development, Europeans were subject to the whims of climate, and all their failings — from mental illness to sexual and racial transgressions, including the cardinal sin, ‘going native’ — were attributed to the insidious climate. On a deeper lever, this determinism became a foil for the failings of individual colonists and, on a broader level, for colonialism itself.

315 Conclusion

Significantly, it was the native character of landscape, more so than its feminised qualities, that was most strongly associated in colonial literature with the corruption of European morals, as Vincent Mahieu’s short story ‘Vivere Pericolasamente’ demonstrated. Powerful landscape features like rivers carried with them all the connotations that the respectable, modern European was meant to detest — dirt, uncontrollable force, and sensuality. The colonist who relished the feel of river water on his skin was also suspected to have developed a taste for other forbidden pleasures, like infidelity and deceit, and perhaps indigenous tastes rather than cultivated, European preferences.

In many ways it was Dutch concerns over the maintenance of their identity as a group, and as individuals, within the landscapes of the Indies that dominated artistic and literary treatments of the tropical environment. Europeans in the Indies were a tiny ethnic minority in the Netherlands Indies who, despite their political and economic power, must often have been confronted by their own Otherness in an Asian world. The difficulty of maintaining a cohesive cultural identity in this context was aggravated by the fact that, around 1900, many ‘Europeans’ were still born and (at least partly) raised in the Indies, and so their cultural identities were often confused or compartmentalised.

Louis Couperus’ and Madelon Lulofs’ two novels, written thirty years apart and in different regions of the Indies, both demonstrated a pronounced late colonial preoccupation with

Dutch women as mediators between nature and culture in the Indies. Women were shown as guardians of Dutch racial identity, which was linked to preserving the customs of

Europe; as resisting the transformative effect of Indies landscapes; and, in the case of

Couperus’ Eva Eldersma, as being unable to flourish or even survive within the landscapes 316 Conclusion

of the tropics. Indeed, in The Hidden Force Eva ultimately returns to Europe. Such notions referred perhaps to doubts that pre-dated the Renaissance about whether Europeans could reasonably expect to survive outside the temperate zones that they were used to.5 They also supported official colonial concerns over the maintenance of racial purity in circumstances where intermarriage was a common historical phenomenon. Though it was well known that

Dutch men in the Indies often married or co-habited with Asian women, and frequently had children with them, Dutch women were strongly discouraged by legislation and social convention from entering into sexual relationships with Asian men. It was only logical, then, that Dutch women would be expected to preserve a range of values associated specifically with Europeanness, chief among them a loyalty to European landscapes and an inability to integrate — socially, intellectually, culturally — with tropical Asia.

Landscape was also deeply implicated in the mechanisms of social reproduction. Maria

Dermoût’s explication of the relationship between landscape and identity in The Ten

Thousand Things included a young Dutch character who was subject to strong indigenous influences and loyalties; who viewed the Indies as home and the Netherlands as a distant, unfamiliar place; and who only ‘used’ his European identity in public and out of perceived necessity, to maintain his mother’s expectations for his social status and future prospects in a world that was assumed would remain colonial. Dermoût herself perhaps also illustrated the problematic of post-colonial identities: of maintaining hybrid personas in either a liberated Indonesia or an embittered Netherlands, both of which had difficulty, in the immediate aftermath of decolonisation, with facing up to the colonial past. This issue is

5 Victor R Savage, Western Impressions of Nature and Landscape in Southeast Asia (Singapore, 1984): 141-2.

317 Conclusion

beyond the scope of this thesis, but it does perhaps explain the strong outpouring of colonial literature and photographs in the 1950s and 1960s in terms of an attempt to regain, if only in print, a space for identities that had once been grounded in topography as well as culture. These identities had often been awkward for many Dutch colonists and also,

Dermoût suggests, for those Indonesians who had to negotiate between indigenous (private, local) and colonial (public, national) identities.

Dutch colonial attitudes to landscape, then, were cultivated along social and cultural lines, and not just with respect to political and economic imperatives. Indies landscapes seen through European eyes were viewed through a prism that refracted the influence of historical Dutch artistic conventions and repeated exposure, both learned and experienced, to certain localities above others. Dutch visions of Indies landscapes also placed colonists authoritatively — though not always securely — at their centre, and erased or attenuated

Indonesian perspectives of the colonial presence that undermined the moral justification for

Dutch rule. These Indonesian views of landscape, though often marginalised in Dutch narratives, were themselves based on a rich heritage of cultural and artistic traditions that sometimes engaged with colonial tastes. A single scene was rarely viewed the same way by these different groups, and yet all the images that they furnished are part of the history of

Indonesian landscapes.

318 Glossary

(Containing words that appear more than once in the text) angker = haunted, sacred, forbidden (Java). babad = historical or genealogical chronicle, among other meanings. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of the term. batik = (noun) cloth patterned using a dye-resist method, usually wax; (verb) to draw by hand (tulis) or print by stamp (cap) a design onto cloth. Most prevalent on Java and Bali. blijver = a longterm Dutch resident of the Indies, a ‘stayer’. bupati = a Javanese aristocratic title; under Dutch rule, a district head, or Regent. candi = ‘temple’ or ‘tomb’ (or both). Cokorda = title of Balinese rulers. cultuurstelsel = cultivation system. desa = village. Groote Postweg = Great Post Road. Built by Governor-General Daendels on Java in the early nineteenth century. gunungan = ‘like a mountain’. Puppet used in wayang. haj = Pilgrimage to Mecca. haji = Person who has completed the pilgrimage to Mecca. Indisch = Dutch word for things/people ‘of the Indies’. jihad = Islamic holy war. jilbab = headscarf worn by Muslim . kalangwan = poetry from Java, composed between the ninth and fifteenth centuries CE; the art of writing poetry; or ‘beauty’. kali = river. kampung = village. kayonan = ‘like a tree’. Puppet used in wayang. keramat/kramat = inhabited by spirits; haunted; sacred. An Arabic loan word, which also implies an Islamic dimension to notions of the sacred. 319 Glossary

kraton = palace (Java). kunstkring = art circle. ladang = dry land that has been cleared and left to lie fallow in order to rejuvenate. mooi Indië = ‘beautiful Indies’. Usually refers to colonial landscape painting. ommelanden = surrounding lands, or environs. payong = parasol. pasisir = Java’s north coast. perkenier = spice-grower. Postweg = See Groote Postweg. priyayi = Javanese ruling elites; members of the official class. pura = temple (Bali). pusaka = magic, sacred or ritual heirloom (Java). rariteiten = curiosities. ramé = busy, lively, crowded. A quality admired in Balinese art and social life. roofbouw = ‘plunderous cultivation’: a derogatory Dutch term for shifting cultivation. See Chapter 3 for a discussion of the term. rust en orde = ‘peace and order’: the motto of the Dutch colonial civil service. sawah = irrigated (as opposed to rain-fed) rice field. schermbossen = watershed protection forests. sirih = the red juice that is emitted from chewing betel. subak = a Balinese form of social organisation structured around the flow of irrigation water through rice lands. tempo doeloe = A Malay term that means ‘olden times’. It was appropriated by Dutch colonial novelists (and, in the post-colonial era, literary historians) to convey a sense of nostalgia with respect to the colonial past. tenget = animated by spirits; haunted; sacred (Bali, Nusa Penida). totok = a ‘full-blood’ European, often used to denote someone newly arrived from Europe; also applied to newly arrived Chinese. ulama = teacher and scholar of Islam. waringin = banyan tree.

320 Glossary

wayang = visual art from Java or Bali that commonly features events from the Hindu Ramayana and Mahabharatta epics. It shows stylised figures in three-quarter profiles. Wayang art manifests in four major performative guises: wayang kulit (shadow puppet theatre), wayang golek (wooden puppet theatre), wayang beber (scroll narratives), and wayang topeng (masked dance theatre). On Bali, wayang also provided the inspiration for traditional painting of the kind still produced in Kamasan. wildhoutbossen = junglewood forests. woesteland = wasteland.

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