INDONESIA PEOPLES HISTORY

My aim in this book is to place Indonesians at the center of their own story. But there is no single story or history, and the principals become Indonesians only in the telling of Indonesian histories. The historical context in which this book is written is the debate within Indonesia itself as to what regions and communities constitute the nation. It is not the distant argument of academics, but the subject of real conflict between and within Indonesian communities. The debate is carried through violence as well as through public discussion. Men, women, and children die, lives are disrupted, property is destroyed, and fear settles in public meeting places. In this book I have tried to establish links between Indonesian communities, to show why, historically, they have reasons to live together in one nation and, at the same time, to show histories of difference.

In the scholarly literature on Indonesia there is a long tradition of stressing Javanese “difference,” particularly in the individual’s approach to Islam as either “orthodox” or “syncretic.” I find “folk Islam” a more helpful way of understanding approaches to religious belief and practice, because it links Javanese with all other Islamic communities of the archipelago and relates Indonesian Islams to the traditions and histories of Islam everywhere. In discussing Javanese difference, most scholars adopt the Javanese (and Dutch) perception that Indonesia is Java plus Outer Islands, that the core is Java and that the societies of the other islands form a fringe. Sometimes that fringe is called the Malay-Muslim zone, again indicating Java’s difference.

For all historians there is a very real problem in how to write an Indonesian history that covers Java and somehow fits “the rest” in. Each community is its own center. It is possible to write a history that begins with Ternate and its water empire, or that takes Aceh as the organizing center, includes its vassal states on the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, and follows the process of such polities becoming incorporated into a state based in Java. No center other than Jakarta was proposed by Indonesians in creating their nation in 1945. No one argued that Palembang in southeast Sumatra, site of the ancient kingdom of Srivijaya, should be the capital of the new country of Indonesia. Nor were there any proponents for Pasai, the first known sultanate to export Islam across the archipelago.

Java and the Javanese have seemed to Indonesians to be the core of the nation. The Dutch city of Jakarta, heir to Muslim and Hindu pasts, was accepted as the appropriate site for the republic’s capital.

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