A CUP OF JAVA: COFFEE AND CONSEQUENCES

The coffee plant, native to Ethiopia, was introduced to the mountainous southwestern region of the Arabian Peninsula around the fourteenth century. Coffee bushes and the habit of drinking coffee were not introduced into Indonesia by Arabs but by the VOC in 1696. Dutch men with personal interests in botany and agriculture and who owned private estates around Batavia had their local workforce experiment in raising and propagating the seedlings. VOC officials used their personal networks with Sundanese nobles to establish the coffee industry in the highlands of west Java. Plants were given to Sundanese district heads who directed farmers to deliver the harvested beans to fulfill their tax obligation. The first harvest was in 1718. The VOC paid the district heads in cash and textiles. It took over the coffee business at the warehouse where the beans were packed and stored until they could be transported to Europe.

At first the VOC paid high prices for coffee, giving local farmers an incentive to grow more coffee than their tax quota for sale to VOC agents. The opportunities attracted migrants into the area. By 1725 three million pounds were harvested and the district chiefs were becoming rich from their percentage of the profits. As supplies of coffee from Java added to coffee available from other production areas in Amsterdam’s market, prices for the luxury product began to decline in Europe. The VOC’s solution was not to expand the number of coffee drinkers but to reduce the amount   of   coffee   grown   by   cutting   the   prices   paid   the   west   Javanese farmer, requiring some coffee bushes to be uprooted, and banning sales of coffee   to   private   wholesalers.   Such   actions   brought   economic   loss   to communities just learning to enjoy a higher standard of living, marked by the increased numbers of Sundanese households able to own a buffalo.

This experiment in coffee production was undertaken by officials who argued for more direct VOC involvement in Indonesian societies. They wanted to bypass Indonesian kings and court factions to work directly with the provincial nobles who controlled networks of village heads and jagos.

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SMALLPOX AND SLAVERY: CAUSES OF A FREELANCE INTELLECTUAL

Willem van Hogendorp was a founding member of the academy, a senior VOC official, and a successful businessman. He spent the years 1774 to 1784 in Java. The academy gave him a reason for pursuing his intellectual interests and a means of disseminating them through its journal. He drew on Batavia’s archives to write histories of the Muslim kingdom of Jayakarta and of the VOC in Java. Van Hogendorp was also exponent and publicist of scientific developments in Europe. He worked to create public support for vaccination against smallpox by publishing a play and an essay in 1779 and by establishing a cash prize for the best essay on vaccination.

Van Hogendorp’s principles led him to be critical of slavery. He found the government-licensed printer, Lodewyk Dominicus, willing to publish his protest in the form of a play. Harsh Blows, or Slavery criticized the treatment of slaves by that segment of Batavia’s population called “Portuguese,” that is, Eurasians and Asian Christians. (It did not treat Dutch or Indonesian slaveowners.) In the play, the vicious treatment of domestic slaves by a Eurasian woman and her Indonesian overseer leads to murderous revolt by the household’s victims.

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PRINTING AND THINKING

Printing was an ancient invention of the Chinese. Europeans made the press a major tool of intellectual life with the advantages of a twenty-six-letter alphabet and a measure of freedom in some western European cities. Within four decades of printing the Gutenberg Bible in Mainz in 1455, printing was introduced into Islamic lands by Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. The Ottoman Turks banned setting Arabic into type, so the first Muslim press of the Arabic world was not set up until 1822. As a result, books from the Islamic heartland that found their way to the Indonesian archipelago before the middle of the nineteenth century were hand written, few in number, and costly.

Printed books arrived in Indonesia through the Dutch. From 1617, presses in Holland published books and pamphlets in Dutch and Malay for communities in the Indonesian archipelago. Because Arabic had been printed in Europe since 1530, the Dutch were able to set Malay in Arabic script too. Devotional texts, such as the Bible, prayers, and catechism, were printed in Malay in both Roman and Arabic scripts and exported to VOC settlements in Asia. The first printing press was shipped from Holland in 1624.

Presses were portable. They consisted of a wooden frame and a tray for the type and were operated by turning handles. Draftsmen and supplies of paper, printer’s ink, lye baths, and proof plates had to be sent from Holland.

Regulations and notices were printed by the Batavia presses, while daily record keeping was handwritten. As in Europe, printers in Indonesia combined academic interests and artisan skills with commerce. Dutch men who ran presses employed Indonesian assistants, and they published books intended for Indonesian as well as Dutch readers. For instance, Lambertus Loderus held the license for government printer in Batavia in the first years of the eighteenth century. He printed official documents under contract and also published and sold books. He researched, wrote, and published a Dutch-Malay dictionary in 1707. Another publisher, Harmanus Mulder, brought out a Malay-language catechism in Arabic type in 1746.

The Indonesians for whom printed books had the greatest impact were Christians and men who worked in VOC offices as clerks and assistants. Most Indonesian scholars rejected the press until the mechanical production of books became acceptable in Islamic countries. Sumatran and Javanese printers borrowed techniques developed by Muslim publishing   houses   in   India   for   typesetting   Arabic   to   produce   books   that closely resembled manuscripts. From the middle of the nineteenth century Indonesian publishers printed books in Malay on Islamic topics for a clientele in religious schools and mosques and used the traveling scholar and catalogue as their publicity and distribution network. This different history of access to printed books meant that Christian Indonesians were exposed to sources of Western knowledge two hundred years before most Muslim Indonesians. All publishers, Dutch and Indonesian, worked under government surveillance.

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DAYAK JOURNEYS

The term Dayak covers many distinct speech groups in Kalimantan. Today it has the meaning of people living away from the coast, and includes nomadic groups, shifting cultivators, and settled peoples. The term is associated with tribal warfare, male fertility cults, tattooing, head hunting, and long houses where several families live together. Dayak has a connotation of remoteness. It designates non-Muslim minorities in the Republic of Indonesia.

Kalimantan’s thick rain forest was a formidable barrier to human settlement before the twentieth century. Archaeological evidence points to settlements along coasts and riverbeds. The nomadic lifestyle of hunting and temporary planting in forest clearings is an adaptation of the last four hundred years, made by Dayaks as they were pushed deeper into the forest by the growth of ports and the web of coastal Islamic culture. Dayak migrations through the interior of Kalimantan led to its eventual settlement. Dayak peoples supplied labor and raised food for Chinese mining communities; they paid their taxes to Malay river chiefs by raising pepper vines in forest clearings. Through these relationships they achieved intermittent communication with the outside world.

In the nineteenth century Dayaks were the object of Kalimantan explorers and ethnographers. Colonial administrations set up forts and sent regular patrols to wipe out tribal warfare and head hunting. Modern Indonesian administrations target Dayaks for “development,” which means settlement in permanent single-family dwellings on small farms, wage labor, and the systematic eradication of Dayak forest landscapes by logging companies. Farming families from Java and Madura have been settled in “empty” Kalimantan territories to relieve overcrowding in their home regions. Their agricultural settlements are a tool of expanding government control and the mechanism for spreading Muslim culture and Javanese and Madurese peoples across the face of the archipelago.

As a consequence of contact with archipelago Muslims, Dayaks made two   kinds   of   journeys.   The   spiritual   journey   led   to   Islam;   Dayaks emerged from it as Malays. Others made a physical journey into the interior of Kalimantan. Their migrations have made possible the steady extraction of resources. Many of these Dayaks also made the spiritual journey to Christianity. In independent Indonesia

Christian and Animist Dayaks see their space shrinking and the economic resources of their habitat being usurped by outsiders. In 1967 in West Kalimantan Dayaks drove Chinese farmers off their rice fields and from their homes. From 1997 Dayaks have made violent attacks on Madurese immigrants. Some attempt, since the fall of the New Order, to reverse a long process of absorption into Indonesia.

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JAVA CAREERS: THE STORY OF SLAMET

Slamet’s journey began in slavery. A Balinese slaver delivered him to Semarang where he became the employee of senior VOC merchant, Willem Dubbeldekop. In the port city world of north Java, the Hindu Balinese   converted   to   Islam   and   took   the   Muslim   Javanese   name   of Slamet. After Dubbeldekop emancipated him, Slamet set up in trade on his own. Using his VOC connections he was appointed representative for Malay   merchants   at   Juwana.   During   the   wars   of   the   1740s,   Slamet trapped a Chinese rebel leader, killed him, and sent his head and amulet to the Dutch commander of Juwana’s fort. As a reward the Dutch made Slamet head of a village of twenty-five Javanese households near Rembang and assigned to him sole right to levy taxes in goods and labor on its inhabitants.

CHINESE TEMPLES, TOMBS, AND CEMETERIES

Chinese temples in Jakarta date from around 1650. Most are rectangular, multiroofed buildings set within a walled compound. Temples   contain   a   main   altar   and   image,   and   side   annexes   for   subsidiary deities. Wall panels inscribed in Chinese characters preserve the name   of   the   temple   god,   and   the   date   and   names   of   donors.   Some temples   were   open   to   the   entire   Chinese   community;   others   served members of a clan, migrants from a common locality in China, or occupational groups such as rice merchants and sailors. Temples honored Buddhist or Taoist deities; those dedicated to local spirits were built near places holy to the Javanese. Mosques for Chinese congregations were the focus of neighborhoods of Chinese Muslims, who were termed Peranakan.

In China the filial son erected a stone memorial to his father. He maintained the tombs of past generations, and made regular offerings. When Chinese men died outside China their sons carried on the tradition of public memorial. Old Chinese cemeteries in Indonesian cities record preservation of Chinese habits overseas and the prosperity some migrants attained. They also show that the skills of stonemason and inscriber of Chinese characters traveled beyond China.

Chinese communities no longer continue this tradition in contemporary   Indonesia.   Urban   land   is   too   expensive   to   purchase   for   burial grounds, while public displays of attachment to traditions of China are not acceptable to many Indonesians. Cremation, which often replaces burial, is also another sign of the long journey of assimilation by Chinese, for it is the burial form of Southeast Asian Buddhism.

Many holy grave sites in Java are attributed to Muslim men of Chinese origin, such as Pangeran Hadiri. According to local tradition, he was a captain shipwrecked off the north Java coast who married Ratu (Queen) Kalinyamat and founded the port city of Japara.

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