Some Intellectual Conflicts: Tensions in Indonesia's Culture

by S. TAKDIR ALISJAHBANA

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THE Second World War had curious, unexpected consequences in Indonesia. For four years we endured Japanese oppression and the whole nation was shaken by it. Standards and values which, under Dutch colonial rule, had seemed firm, went by the boards. The villages, those oases of tranquillity founded on age-old traditions, suddenly began to change. In contrast with Dutch rule, which kept the rural areas as unaltered as possible, the Japanese encouraged the entire population to rise up in favor of their Greater East Asia imperialistic dreams. Nobody remained untouched — the peasant, the civil servant, the teacher, the religious and political leaders. But it was chiefly the simple Indonesian youth who became aware of the vast possibilities he possessed. He plunged idealistically into the boiling caldron of war the Japanese had so calculat ingly prepared.

The revolution against the Dutch after the Japanese had been expelled must be seen in this setting. Suddenly, this most gentle of people — the Indonesians — became street fighters and smugglers, organizers of mass meetings and guerrillas, even dreamers and artists. And out of this ferment emerged the present problems of the Indonesian state. Its people, after their liberation, were overwhelmed by a tidal wave of conflicts and tensions.

Many of the present difficulties in business and government are due to the lack of experienced personnel. Among eighty million people, Indonesia has only about fifteen hundred physicians, four hundred lawyers, a hundred and fifty fully qualified engineers, and fifteen economists to handle its problems. And if our mails seem slow, one should remember that some of our postmen cannot read.

Yet there are deeper, and unfortunately, less temporary difficulties. For the war, revolution, and liberation rendered the problems of the Indonesian culture acute. Culturally, we are suffering from rather violent growing pains.

Over the last two thousand years of Indonesian history four cultural periods have shaped our present outlook. Traces of the most ancient cultural layer, the pre-Hindu phase, still survive. What we would call science was then but the mastery of a knowledge of mysterious spirits and forces, and technique a method of drawing conclusions from that knowledge for human needs. The greatest man possessed the fullest knowledge of and had communication with these magical powers.

Man in his primitive state has little awareness. His social, economic, and political thought and behavior is a consequence of tradition. These ideas are sacred and therefore unchangeable, so his entire spiritual and social life is directed to the past. The community organizes itself in small, closely united, and consanguinous groups living together harmoniously because of past traditions of mutual assistance. Every important occasion in the life of the individual, as well as that of the community, is dealt with by joint deliberations. The word “old” gradually comes to mean wise, holy, and powerful. Much in this way of life still seems natural to Indonesian country people today.

In the second century, Indonesia was brought into contact with India, an advanced civilization which had already developed several scripts and substantial literatures and whose social life had matured in vast and wealthy kingdoms. The Indians had a very effective system of communication, a hierarchically organized civil service, and large standing armies. Their religion, with its world of gods, was sophisticated, Contact with the Hindus profoundly influenced the Indonesians. The Sri Vijaya and Majapahit kingdoms (second to fifteenth centuries) were Indian in custom and manners and extended over large areas. The Indonesian religious concept of spirits and ancestors was fitted into the Hindu pantheon. The new social and economic life stimulated lively intercourse between Indonesian communities and overseas. The splendid architecture of Central Java, perhaps best exemplified by the Buddhist and Hindu temples of Borobudur and Prambanan, flourished at this time. Indonesian literature was born. The arts of painting and dance thrived.

In the thirteenth century there was a fresh cultural invasion over Indonesia—that of Islam. Where ancient Indonesian and Indian influences had blended easily, Islam introduced completely new elements. It reduced the complicated mythology of gods and spirits to a mere superstition. The caste system, with its hierarchy of gods ranging down to mankind, gave way to the conception of one God beneath whom all men are equal. Art, which was bound up with the earlier religion, decayed and lost vigor. The one and only Muslim God demanded but the direct prayers of the devoted.

The last, stage came, as is known, from the West . This European influence stressed rationalism, worldly vision, and an individualism w hich enabled free man, as a rational being, to discover and control the secrets of the forces of nature. The old Indonesian culture had signified tradition and repose; the European one, movement and ceaseless progress. Its focus was toward the future, on youth and originality.

During the past half century, Western influences have gradually penetrated the whole political, economic, and social life of Indonesia, leading to radical changes in its structure. A small, but important, group of Indonesian intellectuals has come into being. Armed with the knowledge and means provided by the West, they have taken ihe lead in liberating the millions, not from Western culture, but from the political and economic grasp in which the West had so long held us. It was a liberation within ihe scope of a new international culture.

Obviously, Indonesian culture today is more complicated than a mere recital of the determining influences can indicate. The various phases did not succeed each ot her like separated act sin a histories I pageant. The rate and pro|ortion of admixture varied from place to place. In Bali, certain elements of Indian culture have endured and produced distinctive art forms. In Central Java the fusion of Islamic and Western cultures is marked. In Minahassa and Ambon and other regions, the oldest pure Indonesian culture survived to come in direct contact with Western culture. In Aché, Islamic influences predominate. Indonesia as a whole is a mosaic of different trails. You might say that we are living in thirty centuries all at once. In one moment we are in the Stone Age (as on Xias Island) and in the Machine Age (as in Jakarta). The result is a number of intricate cult ural problems. Let me give an example — from the field of education.

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In 1937 an Educational Congress was held in Solo in Central Java to establish the basic principles for our future national policies. On the whole, the delegates strongly opposed any “neutral” public education along Western lines, fearing it would breed individualists, rationalists, and materialists and would alienate Indonesian children from their Eastern mentality. Almost everyone wanted a return to the ideal of pesantren or Islamic schools where, under the guidance of religious teachers, young men learn to recite the Koran and are instructed in religious wisdom. The relation between teacher and pupil differs from that in the West; pupils live with the teacher, helping him with his daily tasks, and are treated as members of his own family. But as the Congress progressed the very attempt to formulate the pesantrèn ideal led to fundamental differences of opinion. Some supported the family atmosphere in education, citing the Taman Siswa schools, organized some years before, in which children called their teachers “father” and “mother,” and the very name of the school means “Garden of Friends. Others held that the pesantrèn system would insure peace and order; they called for schools developed along lines reminiscent of India. Another asked to introduce moral education into public schools, and advocated the pesantrèn system for this reason. One prominent Islamic leader emphasized the religious education given in the pesantren, while another emphatically declared that the system was finished and that the spirit, which in the past had made these institutions living Islamic cultural centers, was now dead.

The Congress raised a great deal of controversy. Ironically enough, its very anti-Western attitude and its aversion to rationalism, individualism, and materialism earned it the criticism of having dealt with its problem in too Western a way. It was asserted that most of the fears discussed were Western ones, not yet manifest in Indonesia.

In the domain of law, conflict between Indonesian custom law, Muslim law, and European civil law is still only in its first stages. Before the war the Dutch maintained, and in some cases promoted, the old Indonesian custom laws, to keep the Indonesian villages unchanged and undeveloped. In independent Indonesia, Muslim law is becoming more important. But it has been attacked in Minangkabau, the stronghold of a matriarchal system with its own elaborate, ancient laws. Moreover, drastic imposition of Islamic law produces strong reactions from the Westernized younger generation and the intellectuals.

I do not want to give the impression, however, that modern Indonesia is characterized only by controversy, chaos, and doubt. On the contrary, our being in many fields still at the very beginning of the reconstruction of our country provides opportunity for exciting experiments. Take, for example, the creation of a single uniform language for Indonesia, a country as large as the United States. Malay-based Bahasa Indonesia was adopted as the official language in 1927, and not only must eighty million people, speaking about two hundred languages and dialects, be unified, but we must also adapt an undeveloped language to the complexity of modern science, technology, art, and life. This process, which in the West evolved gradually, must now be completed here within a decade. No less challenging is the reconstruction of the Indonesian school system. Since our country lacks any substantial number of intellectuals or trained personnel in most fields, our first concern is the education of the people.

Another interesting aspect of the Indonesian scene today is the rise of modern literature and art. The quickened adaptation of Western culture over the last thirty years has stimulated a vigorous blossoming of modern, individualistic writing and painting completely independent of the traditional past. The successful exhibition of the painter Affandi in London in (he spring of 1952 and at the Biennale in Venice in 1953, and the response to the Djaja brothers in Paris are evidence of the achievement of modern Indonesian painting. In the art of dancing, however, the heritage of the past has proven so overwhelmingly powerful that the younger generation has been unable to create new dance forms to match the traditional ones.

During the passion of the revolution little attention was paid to these conflicts and tensions. But we cannot escape them now. As we begin to realize fully the extent of these problems, they emerge not as uniquely Indonesian, but as international ones. From the various sources of Indonesian culture — India, Islam, China, and the West—the countries of the present still draw creative power and inspiration. In its struggle to build up a new nation Indonesia mirrors in miniature the problems of the world at large in the creation of a world community. We believe, perhaps with the naivete of a young nation, that this mutual confrontation of traits drawn from the great cultures, stimulated by the urgency of quickly reaching an equilibrium, may well lead Indonesia to solutions for some of the many cultural problems of the whole world.