Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021. xviii, 280 pp. (Figures, maps, B&W photos.) US$19.95, paper. ISBN 9781501758584.
Dutch colonial practices in Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies) have been widely researched by scholars. However, these studies generally focus on the exercise of colonial power in the form of public administration and political economy as well as on the political activities of natives who voiced their anti-colonialism attitudes. The sociocultural performance of power displayed in everyday life by the Dutch as a way to subjugate the natives, and the cultural and mental responses of the natives to it, are still largely neglected areas of study.
Arnout van der Meer’s book seeks to address the lacuna and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the novel aspects of European colonialism in Indonesia, especially in Java. It discusses “the importance of the everyday staging and performance of power in colonial Indonesia and in colonial societies more broadly” (i). In this, the author pays special attention to how the Dutch exploited Javanese culture, by carrying out the “Javanization of colonial authority” (19)—though by detaching it from its proper Javanese sociocultural context—to legitimize Dutch rule, strengthen colonialism, and deepen the Dutch racist stereotypes towards the native. This cultural appropriation disclosed the double standards of the Dutch; on the one hand they mocked Javanese traditions as outdated, but on the other consciously took certain aspects of Javanese culture to perpetuate their colonialism.
Van der Meer examines how Dutch power was built and maintained through language, clothing, customs, etiquette, status symbols, sitting positions, physical gestures, postures, food consumption, architecture, and urban planning. The Dutch used this daily performance of power to conquer the colonized and make them believe that colonialism was natural. Yet, the natives did not stand still.
They performed various “acts of defiance” (11), also socioculturally, with the main mission of creating an equal and respectful relationship between the colonizers and the colonized.
After a theoretically strong introductory chapter, in chapter 1 the author scrutinizes the long efforts of the Dutch to Javanize the practice of colonial power, an undertaking that began when the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) started to engage in local politics in the interior of Java in the seventeenth century, and continued until the beginning of the twentieth century. This chapter convincingly argues that the Dutch not only used native officials as agencies to exercise their power, as previously known, but also absorbed the traditions of Javanese aristocats to further strengthen their colonialism. Examples of this practice are the use of high Javanese from a Javanese subordinate to a Dutch superior, the use of the title kanjeng (great lord) and the offering of a knee kiss (sungkem) to Dutch officials, as well as the right to walk under the gilded parasol (payung).
Chapters 2 and 3 investigate in detail the various forms of resistance of the Javanese to Dutch cultural hegemony. In chapter 2 the author shows that in line with the implementation of Ethical Policy (1901) and the increasingly strong aspirations of the natives to reach progress, a new class was born in colonial society, which mainly consisted of Western-educated natives. They felt humiliated by the excessive respect and obedience they had to show to their Dutch superiors and to the Javanese aristocrats. In chapter 3, the author discusses how these Western-educated Javanese participated in numerous cultural, economic, and political organizations oriented towards progress and equality. They also conveyed their ideas through mass rallies and the vernacular press. Interestingly, van der Meer emphasizes that Islam was also an important element in this struggle because Islam advocates for equality.
In chapters 4 and 5 the author delves into the efforts of Dutch and indigenous culture to approach each other. The endeavour to amalgamate the West and the East to become a modern culture within colonial society was not easy because some Dutch and Indonesians believed that the mixing of cultures might create a degenerate culture. In the meantime, native Muslims tried to be modern by taking inspiration from the transnational Islamic modernist movement based in Cairo.
In chapter 6, the author explains the colonial hegemony featured in fairs, which were held annually in major cities in the Indies. In the fairs, the Dutch were blatantly shown as a developed society, while the Javanese were portrayed as a backward people who could only be consumers of Western products. To challenge this notion, Indonesians created their own fair, pasar malam derma (a night’s fair for a good cause), since 1930, which displayed elements of Indonesian nationalism. An epilogue discusses one more place where colonial cultural hegemony was shown: the pawn house. It exposed the excessive indulgence and fragility of the natives in their pursuit to be considered equal to Westerners; they became Westerners through debt.
Despite his outstanding explanation, the author still overlooks a powerful weapon used by the natives to oppose Dutch cultural hegemony, namely visual arts. Of the ten illustrations the author attaches, seven of them are from Dutch sources, and only two are from vernacular media (another one is a map). Various native press in the colonial era, including Islamic print media and a women’s press, featured abundant photographs and drawings that confronted Dutch colonialism and built awareness about a modern native citizen who was not Westernized; these illustrations deserve more attention. While written texts were useful for disseminating anticolonial ideas to the very small number of educated natives, illustrations were an effective medium for winning the “hearts and minds” of mostly illiterate natives.
Nevertheless, this book is a major addition that is highly recommended for studying the sociocultural practice of European colonialism, especially Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. This book elucidates that while politically Indonesian independence was proclaimed by its political leaders in 1945, the process of mental decolonization and cultural nation-building had already emerged at the turn of the twentieth century among many ordinary Indonesians.
Muhammad Yuanda Zara
Yogyakarta State University, Yogyakarta