“Steedly’s project is not just to read history against the grain, but to significantly interrupt the national history of Indonesia, with fragments of remembered pasts from what she calls the outskirts of the nation. Her narrative opens to the complexity of the past and brings us to a place where the granularity of detail is left to generate multiple puzzlements. Rifle Reports reflects upon material experiences of the past refracted across remembered stories in a precise and telling manner that reveals the authorized history of the nation to be just one of those stories.”—Nancy Florida, University of Michigan

Mary Steedly is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and the author of Hanging without a Rope: Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland.

Rifle Reports

A Story of Indonesian Independence

By Mary Margaret Steedly

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27486-0

Contents

List of Illustrations, ix,
Acknowledgments, xi,
Technical Notes, xv,
Introduction: The Outskirts of the Nation, 1,
1. The Golden Bridge, 20,
2. Buried Guns, 71,
3. Imagining Independence, 113,
4. Eager Girls, 163,
5. Sea of Fire, 208,
6. Letting Loose the Water Buffaloes, 243,
7. The Memory Artist, 275,
Conclusion: The Sense of an Ending, 311,
Appendix 1: List of Informants, 325,
Appendix 2: Glossary and Abbreviations, 330,
Appendix 3: Time Line, 336,
Notes, 339,
References, 353,
Index of Cited Informants, 367,
General Index, 369,

CHAPTER 1

The Golden Bridge

Independence—politieke onafhankelijkheid, political independence—is no more and no less than a golden bridge, and after we have crossed that bridge we will perfect our society.

—Sukarno

The image of independence as a golden bridge to the future can be found several times in Sukarno’s political writings. It first appeared in his 1933 speech “Mentjapai Indonesia Merdeka” (Achieving an Independent Indonesia), quoted in the epigraph above, but nowhere was it more significant than in his famous “Birth of the Pancasila” speech, of June 1, 1945. Speaking to a committee of Japanese officials, Javanese aristocrats, and elite nationalist politicians who had been convened to explore the possibility of Indonesian national independence, he argued that political independence must precede rather than follow from the resolution of such “petty issues” as the nature and organization of state authority, the intellectual and physical readiness of the population for self-rule, and the general level of social welfare throughout the archipelago. These were matters that could be properly dealt with only after political independence had been achieved. “If every one of the seventy million Indonesian people [orang Indonesia] has to be independent in their hearts before we can achieve political independence [English in original], I say again, we will not get an independent Indonesia before the Day of Judgment! … It doesn’t matter if the people [rakyat] can read or not, it doesn’t matter if the economy is strong or not, it doesn’t matter if the people are ignorant or clever, as long as the requirements for an independent state [negara] according to international law are in place, that is, there is a people [rakyat], there is a land [bumi], and there is a government [pemerintahan]—they are already independent.” What was crucial, he insisted, was that the Indonesian people cross that golden bridge together, not divided by class, religious, ethnic, regional, or ideological differences, and without expectations for what would be on its other side. Instead, he called for passion. “Whenever a nation [bangsa] is able to defend its country [negeri] with its own blood, with its own flesh, at that moment that nation is ready for independence. If all we Indonesians [bangsa Indonesia kita] are ready and willing to die, to defend our Indonesian homeland [tanah air Indonesia kita] even if with sharpened bamboo spears, at that moment the Indonesian nation [bangsa Indonesia] is ready and willing, ripe for independence.” This immediately begs the question: If “the people” were not yet “independent in their hearts,” then what would impel them to defend the nation with their lives?

That Indonesia was an already-existing nation, a spiritual entity, was for Sukarno self-evident. He based this claim on its “God-given” territorial integrity (which “even a child can see” on the map) and on the historical precedent of the precolonial kingdoms of Srivijaya and Majapahit, whose reach exceeded the insular limits of Sumatra and Java, respectively. Perhaps more important for him was the common “weltanschauung” of the archipelagic population. In his June 1 speech he sketched what he saw as the fundamental concepts that made up this worldview: nationalism, humanitarianism, consensus-based democracy, social welfare, and religious faith, a set of five principles (Panca Sila) that he ultimately boiled down to one “purely Indonesian” idea: gotong royong, mutual assistance. Yet this vision of a territorially, historically, and culturally united Indonesia, so apparent to a political leader in the nation’s Javanese center, might have been less clear on its outskirts, among those whose place in the national community was neither so obvious nor so privileged: peasants and rural villagers, ethnic outsiders, Christians, outer islanders, urban laborers, women, tribal minorities, native aristocrats, and European-educated and -oriented elites.

In June 1945, as the Pacific War was winding down, it seemed that Japanese occupying forces might honor the promise to grant independence to Indonesia, and Sukarno’s speech needs to be read in the context of that hope. The Japanese surrender, when it came, was surprising in its suddenness. Indonesian nationalist leaders were left uncertain and unprepared as to how to proceed. In the end, they were forced to act. On August 17, under pressure from armed youth impatient with their elders’ caution, Sukarno read the brief text of the independence proclamation to a small gathering at his home in Jakarta. As word of the proclamation trickled out of Jakarta, nationalists began to mobilize support, form militia units, and raise funds to oppose Dutch efforts to retake their former colony.

“With us,” explained Eben Hezer Sinuraya, a former company commander in the Napindo Thunderbolt (Halilintar) Regiment, the largest of the Karo popular militias,

as soon as the gong of independence sounded, it was “forward march” right away! We didn’t know what had to be done, but we stepped right up…. We stepped forward, even if we didn’t know anything, we stepped forward. Later, from the inside, then we could fill it in. Otherwise, what is “Independence”? What is independence? At the time probably 80 percent of the Indonesian people didn’t understand what independence meant, in political terms, they didn’t understand. How could they understand independence? They didn’t even know how to write! … But as soon as there was the proclamation, they joined right in. Whether it was because they were afraid or whatever, well, that’s possible too, but it wasn’t 100 percent because they were afraid. They really wanted to take part.

Despite its resonances with Sukarno’s “golden bridge” speech, this is not the confident assertion of a self-evident national spirit. A thoughtful man, Eben Hezer seemed perplexed by the response he described. Karo highlanders, who were touched lightly by the Dutch presence, would appear to have had little reason to oppose the reinstatement of colonial rule and little material with which to imagine the grand sweep of an archipelagic national community. It may well be that Karo villagers “really wanted to take part,” as Eben Hezer said—but what did they think they were taking part in?

Anthony Reid has recently characterized Indonesian nationalism as “anti-imperial” and argued that it was through the “alchemy of revolution” that an ascribed colonial identity (I., inlander, “native”) was transformed into a “passionately felt new community.” The anti-imperial struggles of Southeast Asian decolonization—in the Philippines, Vietnam, Burma, Indonesia—”sacralized the new identities which had been charted on the map by the old empires.” Especially among the “state-averse” societies of the Southeast Asian uplands and elsewhere on the outskirts of state power, the colonial government was seen as an “essentially alien but necessary construct, which opened doors to a broader modernity than would otherwise be possible” (Reid 2009:26). The Indonesian state took up the mantles of modernity and necessity and attached them to a collective sense of national belonging.

Reid’s assessment is a good descriptive summary of events and outcomes during the Indonesian independence struggle, but it is less satisfying as an explanation of anti-imperial nationalisms in places like Karoland. Nationalist commitment was, for one thing, not evenly spread across the archipelago or even across the many ethnolinguistic communities of northern Sumatra. Why then did Karo respond with such enthusiasm to the call for national independence, when other groups, most notably Javanese plantation laborers, who were unquestionably the most exploited population in the region, did not? How did they come to align themselves with the political movements of an urban intelligentsia almost entirely drawn from other ethnic communities? What significance could colonial borders have had for people who had never traveled beyond the limits of their own district and whose relations with neighboring groups had as often been characterized by enmity as by cooperation? What kind of passionately felt community could they have imagined? What could independence have meant to them? What, in other words, was this strange alchemy of revolution?

This is what political scientists refer to as a “puzzle”: a seemingly paradoxical situation or event that may serve to illuminate aspects of more general phenomena—in this case, the nature of decolonization, peasant political consciousness, mass violence, and the nationalisms of post–World War II Asia. There is no shortage of possible answers to this puzzle. Resistance “from below” is a well-worn topic in a range of disciplines and places, both historical and contemporary. Slave revolts and peasant uprisings, riots and crowds, millenarian and cargo cults, religious movements, royalist pretenders, supernatural signs and rumors, and prophecies of the “world turned upside down” have all been widely examined, generating an equally wide range of explanations: psychological, political-economic, cultural, sociological. In some cases, they are said to be the outcome of external pressures—global economic forces, national or international politics, the intensification of state power—in the absence of intermediary mechanisms capable of alleviating such damages. Others find the explanation in the psychic disruptions of colonialism, the anxieties of modernity, the collapse of state authority, the contradictions of capitalist exploitation, or any of a range of other forces.

In his classic essay on anticolonial violence, Frantz Fanon celebrated spontaneous popular violence as a “cleansing force” in the struggle against colonial oppression (1963:94), arguing that although the “rank and file of a nationalist party is urban,” only the colonized peasantry constitutes a revolutionary force, “for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain” (1963:60–61). Violence “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction” and enables the “liquidation of regionalism and of tribalism” that prevent the colonized from entering the modern world (1963:94). Fanon regarded local values and customs as an atavistic burden, but for other analysts these are precisely the moving force of rebellion, whether in the form of the “moral economy” of subsistence agriculture (Scott 1976); the figure of the “social bandit,” a Robin Hood-like folk hero who serves as a spokesman and template for demands of economic and social justice (Hobsbawm 1959); or the fundamentally religious worldview that underlies the “rebel consciousness” of subaltern actors (Guha 1983).

In Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, Eric Wolf emphasized the role of “tactically mobile” middling peasantries as vanguard agents of popular revolt. Paradoxically, he noted, it is “this culturally conservative stratum which is the most instrumental in dynamiting the peasant social order,” because they are also “the most vulnerable to economic changes wrought by commercialism, while [their] social relations remain encased within the traditional design.” This is the group most exposed to ideas emergent in the cities, primarily through the experiences of their children who are sent away to school, join the urban workforce, or extend their commercial activities into urban markets. “The middle peasant,” Wolf concludes, “is caught in a situation in which one part of the family retains a footing in agriculture, while the other undergoes ‘the training of the cities'” (Wolf 1969:291–92).

Issues of mediation and mediating groups are also central to Miroslav Hroch’s (1985) analysis of the “social preconditions of national revival” in nineteenth-century Europe. For Hroch, it was the small-town intelligentsia of teachers, journalists, civil servants, students, and clerics, readers of newspapers, and members of political clubs who served as the primary disseminators of nationalist ideas from the city to the countryside. Moving beyond the assumptions of ethnic primordialism, he hypothesized that nationalist mobilization was most likely in regions characterized by dense networks of communication and mobility and by moderate levels of social change. The presence of schools and the development or intensification of commercial agriculture and petty commodity production all supported the kind of discursive context that contributed to the spread of nationalist ideas.

More recently, insurgency studies have turned from the liberatory to the brutal aspects of irregular warfare. Some have focused on the traumatic experience of victims, whether to assess the extent of violence, to advocate for reparations or repair, or at the least to recognize their suffering (Daniel 1996; Das 1990, 2007; Fassin and Rechtman 2009). Others look for an inner logic of mass pathology or cultural affinity (Hinton 2005), regard ethnic conflict as one of the “darker sides” of territorial nationalism in a globalizing world (Appadurai 2006), or focus on the manipulations of elite or state actors who directly provoke violent outbreaks (Aditjondro 2001; Aretxaga 2003; Taussig 1989, 2005). A common conclusion is that violence comes to be regarded as a legitimate response through the demonization or “dehumanization” of outsiders, as typified by the notion of ethnic “cleansing.” As Appadurai (2006:6) puts it, when social uncertainty intersects with such Manichaean notions of “us” and “them,” violence itself can “create a macabre form of certainty.”

One might argue that there are too many explanations here rather than too few, so that it is possible to select from the menu of options and find an explanatory fit in virtually any given case. Yet all are partial. Each can tell us something about Karo participation in the nationalist struggle for independence, but none precisely fits the situation—or, alternatively, fits equally well in cases where participation was not so widespread and enthusiastic. Neither the Fanonian “wretched of the earth” nor a “tactically mobile” middle peasantry, inspired neither by religious beliefs nor by notions of social banditry, Karo were close enough to the lowland urban centers to feel their influence but sufficiently disadvantaged by mission paternalism and colonial neglect to remain minor actors in a political field dominated by other players.

Where a political scientist might aim to solve the puzzle of popular nationalism in Karoland, I want to retain a sense of puzzlement, to use it as a guide in tracking both the unaccounted-for events of the independence struggle and the memories and stories that have been produced around them. This means regarding stories as more than just sites for information retrieval or strategic positioning. It means attending to their form as well as content, to the shape that memory takes in narrative, the layers of interpretation through which it is pressed, the way it circles and circulates, how it escapes, is recaptured, and escapes again—or doesn’t.

This chapter sets the stage for that exploration by introducing Karoland and its people, sketching their historical engagement with the colonial state of the Netherlands East Indies, and acknowledging a few of the key sources that drew me to this project. I then describe the methodological issues and concerns of my research project and discuss problems regarding memory and narrative, as they affect the exposition and presentation of materials here. But first, I want to consider some of the social and performative aspects of this fieldwork in memory’s war zone, focusing on what I have called the “audiencing practice” of the ethnographer (Steedly 1993).

(Continues…)Excerpted from Rifle Reports by Mary Margaret Steedly. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.