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.

photocredit: blog.nathanbransford.com

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.

SURAPATI’S LEGACY: THE CONVERSION OF EAST JAVA

In 1743 Pakubuwono II (r. 1726–1749) rid himself of problems in Mataram’s eastern provinces by transferring Surapati’s former lands to the   Dutch. Rebel bands used east Java as a place of retreat; Balinese princes still considered it as tributary territory to their kingdoms in Bali.

The VOC could defeat Indonesian armies, but it could not directly administer territories distant from its Batavia headquarters. Its method was to use local officials and Chinese networks to get production and trade moving. When it became chief landlord of east Java, the company continued Surapati’s system of administration. It appointed as officials only men who were Muslim, and ordered them to make conversion of the Hindu population a priority of office. The second strategy was encouraging immigration of Muslim farming families from Madura and central Java. In this way the VOC achieved Surapati’s goals: Balinese influence was lessened, the forest refuges of rebel bands were reduced, and the landscape was permanently settled by farmers who raised crops for export.

Over time Muslim immigrants became the majority population. East Java was detached from Bali’s orbit and was integrated into the history of Muslim Java under the Christian overlordship of the Dutch.

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JAGO: PREDATOR OR LOCAL HERO

The Javanese word jago  means fighting cock, but also designates the leader of a band of men. A jago was a man who depended on a forceful personality, who was not confined by domesticity, and who lived on the fringes of society spying, selling information, and hiring out his men as vigilantes. Jagos were distinguished by their wild manners and appearance. They wore their long hair loose, instead of bound under a head cloth; they were careless of polite norms; and they claimed knowledge of the occult. They used amulets and oaths to bind men to their service.

They were the terror of rural communities, stealing buffaloes and destroying houses, or they were local heroes who assaulted and robbed tax collectors and moneylenders. They sold their services to kings and rebels.

During battles they frequently changed sides. Chinese bosses employed jagos to patrol the opium business; Javanese and Dutch officials hired them as informants and to control workers.

In twentieth-century urban contexts, jagos were small political bosses who   delivered   workers   to   factories,   kept   industrial   order,   controlled brothels and gambling, put protesters on the street for politicians, or organized arson and looting. They were freelancers of Indonesia’s struggle for national independence. In East Timor jagos launched massacre, plunder, and arson in retaliation against the Timorese movement to withdraw from Indonesia. Using the vocabulary of jihad, jagos today assemble militias to extend Muslim space and to undermine national government.

photocredit: saroniatman.blogspot.com

THE SPICE ISLANDS: INDONESIAN OR EUROPEAN HISTORY?

Older histories start the story of Indonesia with the arrival of Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch ships in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in search of the home markets for cloves, nutmeg, and mace. These histories relate products native to Indonesia almost solely to Europe’s history. In this version, the crusaders developed a taste for the luxuries of the East from their brief history as princes of feudal states in Jerusalem, Tripoli, and Antioch. Rotting meats back home in Europe needed spices found in Muslim markets. Hatred of Islam led Europeans to seek a sea route to the East in order to defeat Arabic-speaking merchants in commerce. According to this history, the “discovery” of the spice islands was followed by imposition of European monopolies on the production and sale of spices and devastation of local economies. In the industrial age Europe no longer needed spices, and the spice islands sank into oblivion.

An Indonesia-centered account of the spice islands covers a quite different set of topics: Indonesian uses of spices; forms of labor control; the evolution of hereditary monarchs; conversion of the ruling classes to Islam; the development of Ternate war fleets; and shifts in cultivation sites and   sailing   patterns   to   defeat   European   monopolies.   An   Indonesia-centered   account   integrates   the   eastern   archipelago,   including   north-western New Guinea, into Indonesian histories. The spice islands have an independent   history,   one   that   intersects   with   Europe   but   is   not   submerged by it.

photocredit: duyfken.com

PIGS AND PORK

Consumption of the pig was banned in Islamic diet in the seventh century. Although wild pigs did not thrive in the semi-arid conditions of the Islamic heartland, they did in Indonesia’s rain forests. They especially adapted to forests inhabited by nomadic cultivators, uprooting their crops and eating tubers, fruits, and nuts.

Pigs were raised and presented as taxation in Hindu Majapahit; their flesh was consumed at feasts. There are references to pigs and dogs—another animal unclean in Muslim tradition—being brought to the capital by happy taxpayers. Majapahit texts tell that kings hunted wild pigs for sport, while commoners hunted them for food. For Muslims, the taboo on eating pork was a boundary marker between converts to the new religion and others. The taboo redirected cookery in the kitchens of palace, town, and village and brought Islam into the female domain of food selection and preparation.

Jungle habitats shrank owing to agriculture and population growth. Pig breeding and hunting remain important economic activities only in Bali, Papua, and Manado.

photocredit: buddy-dubaibase.blogspot.com