Sumatrans Inventing Indonesia: ‘Java’, Mass Media and Colonial Scholarship in the Late Colonial Period

Paul Tickell (School of Humanities and Social Sciences University of New South Wales at ADFA)

Globalisation, cosmopolitianism and the intertwining of local, national and much broader transnational identities are frequently seen as the markers of culture in the late twentieth century.  At the same time the redundancy, if not the end, of the ‘nation-state’ and the underlying ideology of nationalism are also alluded to in much social science discourse.  The interaction between processes of globalisation, cosmopolitianism and local and national patriotisms, however, has a much longer history than merely the last decades of the twentieth century.  The triangulation of these processes earlier in the twentieth century, rather than alluding to the end of the nation-state and nationalism, were in fact to a considerable degree its motivating force.

In the 1920s and 1930s Indonesian nationalists began to construct an imagined and grand historical past.  Much of this imagined past built on (Dutch) colonial literary, philological and archaeological scholarship, which in various guises was in turn presented to indigenous students through the colonial education system.  Several Dutch-educated and Dutch-literate, Sumatran-born authors and journalists—Moh. Yamin, Sanoesi Pané and Rustam Effendy, in particular—began a process of reappropriating and reinterpreting this Dutch scholarship, both in its textual and archaeological forms and in doing so they began a process of popularising an image of “classic” Java that has more or less become the orthodoxy of a much, and rightly, criticised Java-centric view of Indonesia’s imagined past.  It is ironic and perhaps significant that ethnic Javanese authors, journalists and cultural activists, like Noto Soeroto and Ki Hadjar Dewantoro, appear to have been less inclined to popularise such a Java-centric vision of the past.

This paper will examine how then-contemporary processes of globalisation (viz, Western colonialism and colonial education), cosmopolitanism (viz, Dutch-speaking, Dutch-literate and for some Dutch-resident Indonesian intellectuals) and patriotism (viz, Indonesian nationalism) interacted in literary and journalistic production and produced what has now become the conventional orthodoxy of Indonesian nationalist history.