Colonial Jakarta Through the Memories of Its Intellectuals

A CertAin Age A john hope frAnklin Center book A CertAin Age ColoniAl JakArtA through the MeMories of its intelleCtuAls rudolf Mrázek duke university press Durham and London 2010 © 2010 duke university press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan. Typeset in Monotype Fournier by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “Bypasses and Flyovers: Approaching the Metropolitan History of Indonesia,” Social History 29, no. 4 (2004): 425–43. For Ben Anderson Contents preface: Promenades �� ix Technical Note �� xv one. Bypasses and Flyovers �� 1 two. The Walls ��25 three. The Fences �� 73 four. The Classroom �� 125 five. The Window �� 187 postsCript. Sometimes Voices �� 235 Notes �� 253 Bibliography �� 293 Index �� 303 preface Promenades We might ask: who would learn from this? Can someone teach me that I see a tree? —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour The people of this book with few exceptions are of a colonial and Indonesian urban elite of the twentieth century, which means a group to a lesser, larger, or overwhelming extent touched by and induced into the Western culture of imperial modernity (predominantly secular, among other things, which explains why so few devout Muslims appear in the book). The group in particular distinguishes itself by its possession of Dutch literacy. It never made up more than about 0.5 percent of the colony’s population,1 which, however, amounts to as many as three hundred thousand men and women, living in towns and cities as a general rule. Since the early twentieth century, through the late colonial era and national revolution and deep into independence after 1945, the urban intellectuals became a major irritant and inspiration, in- jecting their sense of the new, of progress and of freedom, into the colonial and postcolonial society at large. Between 1990 and 2000, on every university vacation, and once in 1995 on a six-month visit, I interviewed elderly people of Indonesia, mainly in Jakarta (formerly Batavia), the Indonesian metropolis, about their youth and childhood. The old people lived through the colonial period, the Japanese occu- pation during the Second World War, and the years of independent Indonesia after 1945. I expected that I would be told about the transition to modernity, from colonialism to postcolonialism, and about the failed (or unfinished) Indonesian revolution. I also hoped to learn more about the interview situa- tion, about the relation between written and oral documents and, namely, about how the tone and accent of both interviewer and interviewee might cast the research and its conclusions. Indeed, it turned out that the most rewarding part has been how the talking went; how we moved and stumbled across a particular landscape that was theirs and, in a revealingly different way, gradually, also mine. As I listen to the tapes now, I have a sort of Le Corbusier feeling: “The coordinated physiological sensations in terms of volume, surface, contour and color,” now as then, “afford an intense lyricism.”2 The image, notion, and sense of promenade remained with me throughout the research for, and writing of, this book. As for promenades, nothing seems, of course, more out of place in the hot, muddy, mosquitoey, dusty, and over- crowded Indonesian towns and cities, Jakarta in particular. But exactly because of that, perhaps, the image and the word have stuck with me. Le Cor- busier’s (again) “promenade architecture” brought the term to me very early on—the high modern and avant-garde city builder’s device for making the living space into a passage, to abolish (or at least to soften, to make less noticeable) the walls and all the other barriers and restraints of twentieth- century urban life. Bertolt Brecht, a poet and another big presence as I was writing this book, articulated Le Corbusier’s promenades well: Cover your tracks . Go into any house when it rains and sit on any chair that’s in it But don’t sit long. And don’t forget your hat. Cover your tracks. Soon no dirt any more, but The hard mortar with which Cities are built.3 This rang in my ear. Pictures at an Exhibition—and I still have that cassette with Modest Mussorgsky’s music on the shelf among the other tapes for this book—the theme in particular that recurs and connects the whole piece: it is called “Promenade.” As I listen, I feel as if shuffling through an exhibition, stopping now and then, as the music wants it, by this or that picture on the Preface x wall. I learn that many paintings appeal in their richest, touch me closest, tell me most, when they just flicker in my eye as I walk, in passing. During the writing, Walter Benjamin was there with me—and I am afraid, never enough—in particular, he at a certain age, as he tries to escape the sinking Europe in 1940, leaving the trunk with his “On the Concept of History” behind.4 Benjamin’s Passagen (translated as The Arcades Project) is teaching me that a landscape appears truest when glanced over furtively, over one’s shoulder, indeed felt as if already almost in the past. This was, too, why Benjamin’s essay “Berlin Childhood” was especially important to this project. Not exactly because it smells and sounds so much like my childhood’s big, gray, and homey housing block in Prague, but more because it had been written as a glance toward where the writer was not going, from a place of exile, or running, when all the past was already on the brink of being lost—or of becoming history. I want Benjamin, Brecht, Le Corbusier, and the others who came later to appear in this book like flickers, or like the pictures at the exhibition, like fellow walkers—and like those elderly Indonesians who for some reason decided to talk to me, as if in passing.5 The first chapter, “Bypasses and Flyovers,” finds a city—colonial/postcolonial—sinking in crises and, by the logic of it, increasingly experienced as a web (and I wish the word to sound as postmodern and indeed electronic as it can). Speed and lightness over the mud and dust define the city and this observer of the city as well—my keeping a distance from my subjects, my passing by, the burden of my method. As it was said about another watcher of this kind, “he knew that it was possible for him to make his escape at any moment with a flap of the wings.”6 Like one of those Brecht wrote about, I got to (almost) any house there was, and I never stayed long. In a fleeting way, and this admission is crucial, I have observed the intimacy of the inside of the homes. This is my chapter two, “The Walls.” A distinct sense of childhood was eagerly given to me, and with the same eagerness I accepted it, and as such I try to describe it in this section of the book. Rumbling from the outside, the unsheltered, un- belonging and un-intimate, as we talked was most closely upon us. Were these people self-protective, inventing, censoring? How much did it matter? At no other moment had nostalgia given me such a sharp picture of the city. Promenades xi More than the others, this chapter confirms the surrealist idea that truth can best be found in dreams “as they are slipping away.”7 In chapter three, “The Fences,” the space of intimacy, as recalled, is ex- panding. The children of the past are running in the chapter (as the elderly people of the present are talking): through gates rarely locked, over fences mostly low and porous—as far as the street. Almost surfing, lightly (pro- gressively, that is), the street becomes a commonplace, hominess upgraded. Depressingly, as one thinks about it, edges of the intimate, thresholds, win- dowsills, crossings in these memories are missing. Chapter four, “The Classroom,” is here to make sense of it all—as all was supposed to be ordered, tabulated, articulated, inside and by the modern and colonial classroom. The classroom was as far as the best and brightest children of the colony were ever to get—through the gates, over the fences, along the street. Measured by time scholastically divided and by the architecture of the classroom (rows of benches, the blackboard, the portrait of the Dutch Queen), the youths of the colony were made to grow. Colony as a big classroom—it may seem an apocalyptic vision. But this is how it was widely, and sort of fondly, recalled to me. As for myself, I certainly remember that feeling well: the classroom, more than anything, made one wish to look to a window; even a picture on the classroom wall made one wish that the picture were a window, a break in the wall. Chapter five, “The Window,” tells about the birth of the window, mainly out of this classroom way of looking. How might one wish this? To (make a) picture (for) oneself, a picture as window? How might one wish to break a wall in the ultimately architectural, best-of-the-bourgeois, colonial space? In chapter five, the main theme of A Certain Age hopefully becomes clear—a possibility of freedom. It may well be that, in the process of writing this book, I became com- plicit in what is clinically known as the “refusal .

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