an attempt to define creole nationalism

Creole nationalism, the central concept in our title, obviously deserves an explanation. The word creole has been deliberately chosen because it points not just to European colonial descendants but also to a broader process of cultural creolization, and reflects the liminal position of the comprador or middle classes from whose ranks many of the early nationalist leaders came. I also use the word creole to give a name to a central idea in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. One of his most provocative arguments is that nationalism is not a European accomplishment but a peculiar blend of French and North American thinking that was located in the Western hemisphere. This peculiar blend fits our understanding of creole. At the same time, I agree with Hastings that Anderson, Gellner, and Hobsbawm belittle the older trajectories towards nationhood of the West European coastal states. But I would like to extend the implications of his critique to European overseas settlements, since we cannot ignore the existence and relevance of ‘vernacularized’ types of citizenship in ancien régime colonial posts.¹⁰

The fact is that the southern part of the late eighteenth-century world map was littered with colonial enclaves, and some plantation societies, which enclosed a broad gamut of groups living in the orbit of colonial presence: freed slaves, descendants of European colonizers, local trading partners of the European trading companies, and locally born planters and clerks. In these localities embryonic notions of citizenship did exist prior to the emergence of the nineteenth-century “new” colonialism—which Cooper and Stoler define as inspired by European bourgeois pretensions and values. If we accept, with Hastings, that these pre-nineteenth-century notions of citizenship are relevant in the age of “new” colonialism, we should ask how in Asia but also in Africa particularistic notions of citizenship became inscribed by metropolitan liberal ideologies.¹¹

In that respect, the situation in Africa and Asia was not entirely different from the Caribbean and Latin American experience. What could be perceived as a revolutionary moment in the West, turning native subjects into apprentices of liberal citizenship,¹² became a more or less evolutionary trajectory in the East. It is important to acknowledge that in Africa and Asia this was not a unilinear process of middle classes absorbing the metropolitan ideological waves of the nineteenth century; it was part of a broader context of philosophical renewal of different world views: of Hinduism, Islam, and Confucianism. Naturally, these processes of renewal were not necessarily located within the framework of Western European colonialism, as was the case in Central Asia, and they might have been part of a vigorous resistance to the colonial state, as was the case in Aceh.¹³ What matters here, however, is that within the orbit of the colonial state, no single intellectual tradition could monopolize the minds of the “middle classes,” which might explain why “syncretist” philosophies played such a central role in pioneering nationalism in Asia and Africa.

Our argument is that the thematic of citizenship in the East was unavoidably positioned in plural societies and syncretist in character. Whereas in Latin America mestizaje, or miscegenation, became central in nation-building, this was never the case in, for example, British India, where comprador classes like the Parsees and Banias of Bombay or the bhadralok of Bengal, with their strong sense of spiritual autonomy, played a central role in early nationalism. It would nonetheless be a fallacy to conclude from the absence of a mestizaje process that creoles in the East lacked the cultural disposition to give voice to the nation. And yet this is the overriding tendency in the dominant historiography. Creole nationalists, like the Bengal early nineteenth-century father of the Young Bengal movement Henry Derozio or the Indo-European Ernest Douwes Dekker in colonial Indonesia, are considered to be important inspirational figures, but outsiders to early nationalism. Needless to say, such perceptions do not constitute any evidence for the claim that these creole nationalists would be alien to Africa or Asia.

Colonial boundaries between Europeans and non-Europeans appear to be an ambivalent mixture of nationality, religion, and professional class, which does not a priori give an exclusive position to white persons and their offspring or particular “marginal minorities.” The question of who could be accorded metropolitan citizenship, the standards of eligibility for applicants for this citizenship, and the exclusion of those who definitely were not eligible, was, as Stoler has extensively argued, a constant source of tension and contest about race, sexual morality, and cultural competence (which includes educational skills).¹⁴

Ethnic categorizations, and particular political and economic positions ascribed to these categories in colonial empires, are open to change and variation. In colonial Indonesia, the creole population did play a crucial role in colonial administration, in the development of the nineteenth-century plantation economy, and in early nationalism. But it could have been very different, as has been demonstrated by the example of British India, where the residents of mixed descent were rather marginalized.¹⁵

The hub of the matter is that from the beginning of the nineteenth century comprador classes from a variety of religious and racial backgrounds claimed a status equal to metropolitan citizenship, which included political representation, equal access to offices, and freedom of trade. This is what I define as creole nationalism. For lack of any alternative, we might call its agents the “comprador classes.” “Spiritual domains” might be extremely diverse—particularly within colonial cities, which were melting pots by definition—but what matters is the sense of belonging to an imperial citizenry, without giving up a sense of being different from metropolitan expatriates. The best-known example of this co-existence is Senegal's Quatre Communes, where African/Islamic and creole spiritual domains shared a single polity. The African constituents, the originaires, would claim French citizenship based on the fact that their names were included in the lists of electors of municipalities that had as “communes de plein exercise” the same status as their counterparts in metropolitan France.¹⁶

The Quatre Communes are the perfect extra-American case of creole nationalism.

conditional loyalty

Creole nationalism in the East did not stumble from revolution to revolution but took a fundamentally reformist trajectory, negotiating with the colonial power. It remained within the imperial framework and was driven by an understanding of a quid pro quo. It is this very assumption of a contract between an individual and the sovereign that is central to the notion of citizenship. The main source of contestation was the nineteenth-century colonial centralizing bureaucracy, which on the one hand opened up new economic and educational opportunities but encroached upon previously attained economic and political positions of local citizenries on the other. An important, perhaps overriding, reason why these citizenries acquiesced in the continuation of colonial rule was that they became part of the structures of the colonial states when these extended their domination over the surrounding territories of the ancien régimes' enclaves. These colonial wars became moments of further juxtaposition of subject and citizen and of the repositioning of the local citizenries within the emerging colonial state.¹⁷

In general, the emergence of the nineteenth-century colonial state sharpened the comprador classes' awareness that loyalty was something reciprocal. In colonial Indonesia and British India they remained loyal during the Java war (1825–1830) and the Mutiny of 1857, respectively.¹⁸

It is, however, not their loyalty itself that should interest us, but its implicit, and sometimes explicit, claim that this loyalty must be based upon just rule. Creole nationalism in the nineteenth-century colonies is precisely about procuring the just colonial rule to which colonial citizenries or subjects of the imperial crown felt themselves entitled. A stream of petitions for imperial reform reached the metropolitan governments from the onset of the nineteenth century: from Senegal, British India, and the Dutch East Indies. The colonial civil service, local government, and higher education were the contested terrains between local comprador ambitions and metropolitan national interests.¹⁹ Fitting into this pattern were the creoles of the Dutch East Indies—and as a matter of fact their Dutch immigrant relatives—who, as soon as they had received news of the European revolutions of 1848, convened a large meeting in the colonial capital to put across their claim to be a constituent part of the empire. They demanded metropolitan citizen rights be extended to the creole population in the colonies, at least in the areas of education and access to the colonial civil service.²⁰

This petitioning was indubitably particularistic, but that does not necessarily set colonial literate societies apart from their counterparts in the metropoles, or in the Western hemisphere for that matter. The petitioners shared with the elites of the new Latin American republics a profound lack of interest in the plight of the peasants or the natives. It has already been pointed out, for example, that the early reformers and petitioners in Calcutta belonged to the family network of local entrepreneurs, if they were not bankers and indigo planters themselves.²¹

Likewise, the creoles of the Dutch East Indies were part of the colonial administration and business. But gradually this particularism began to dissolve. More than anything else, print capitalism in conjunction with the emerging debates on poverty and social inequality educated the comprador classes about politics, economics, and society in the second half of the nineteenth century.²² Though the vernacular press in the East Indies did not emerge until the 1880s, Dutch-language commercial newspapers began to circulate in 1849. From its very beginning the press advertised itself as a defender of liberal values, which was partly in tune with the comprador classes' struggle against colonial monopolies—though it also contradicted their (mostly domestic) slaveholding and use of corvée labor on their plantations. It is important to note that even if these newspapers were read only by the relatively well-to-do, in those days 85 per cent of Europeans in the Indies were Indies-born. Their social elite was much more creole than their British counterparts in India.²³

Like in India, in colonial Indonesia the sense of nationhood—or at least its expression—emerged with the first newspapers. Of particular importance was a newspaper that appeared in the remote harbor town of Padang, Sumatra in the 1870s. It published articles that warned that the Java War of 1825–1830 could be followed by a new bloody insurrection to avenge the colonial exploiters.²⁴

In 1877 in Padang the creole journalist A. M. Voorneman used, for the first time, “Young Indies” as a title for a political program demanding justice for the Indies and political representation.²⁵ Though the philosophy of what soon came to be known as the Padang Movement might sound utterly mundane compared with the sophistication of the Calcutta intellectual renaissance that played such an important role in early Indian nationalism, we can perceive some important parallel moments of “rediscovering one's spiritual domain.” Padang breathed the unmistakably republican spirit of an old and virtuous community, where local identity, progressive critique of colonialism, and consciousness of complexion became fused. Voorneman and his colleagues took up the dark creoles' nickname sinjo (derived from the Portuguese word for gentleman) as a term of distinction. This was more than simply adopting a name though; it was also a retreat into an extra-Dutch domain of “native Europeans.” Meanwhile, the Padang Movement identified the unbecoming habits of the colonists and the undisciplined lifestyle of the newcomers, their heavy drinking in particular. The mockeries of these unbecoming habits echo the bhadralok literature of Calcutta.²⁶

The Padang advocates of Young Indies spoke about their “fatherland” and felt no restraint in speaking for the indigenous population too. Having embraced the idea of a “fatherland,” they drew the line at the sojourning Europeans. This also appears from the first creole movement, the Indische Bond (Indies League), established by the creole journalist G. A. Andriesse in 1898. His slogan was “Indië for the Indiërs” [Indies for the Indiers], emphatically excluding colonial nabobs in the Dutch parliament, regardless of whether they were born in the Indies.²⁷

Complaints about discrimination and colonial drainage fused with critique of lavish “remittances” for retired civil servants and planters.

It is not difficult to place the Indies journalists Voorneman and Andriesse in a broader comprador context. Their discourse was imbued by the spirit of the age and merged specific class interests with an emerging progressive denunciation of metropolitan rapacity and discrimination as unjust colonial rule.²⁸

A comparison with the writings of the Bombay businessman, intellectual, journalist, and “father of the drainage theory” Naoroji might be appropriate. Naoroji compiled his numerous speeches and reports on the bleeding of India and the discrimination against native Indians when government positions were being allocated in a 675-page volume entitled Poverty and un-British rule in India. In a compilation of Voorneman's newspaper articles, published in 1884, the Hollanders figured as “loot-landers” (rooflanders). Other pieces in this volume condemned the colonial war in Aceh and demanded political representation. Notwithstanding the bitterness of their tone, both Voorneman and Naoroji expected to be able to join forces with progressive minds in the metropole. Naoroji, after all, consciously used the word “Un-British” to characterize existing colonial rule.²⁹ In fact, Naoroji's and Voorneman's arguments were quintessentially the same as those of metropolitan progressive liberals and socialists, who began to put the immorality of colonial exploitation on the political agenda. Their positions were even close to the concerns of late nineteenth-century progressive imperialists, who began to discover the subject of poverty and joined the cause of colonial reform.

The comprador classes had gradually broadened their sense of belonging from a local class to a fatherland. It was a widening, not a change, of perspective as the critique of metropolitan selfishness was intertwined with opposition to the discriminating practices of colonial rule. The agenda was still reformist, since both with regard to political empowerment and equal opportunities the point of reference was the liberal promise of empire. Racial barriers had always existed in colonial settlements, but from the mid-nineteenth century onwards they were no longer in tune with the newly emerging principles. The time-honored practice of appointment through protection was giving way to the principle of competence, and as consequence the new word for racial barrier was discrimination.³⁰

Discrimination was not a formal element of empire; indeed, the application of the criterion of professional qualifications theoretically opened the door for all colonial subjects. Neither the Dutch nor the British government bothered to formally close the colonial civil service for the very few Indonesian or Indian candidates who successfully completed their education in the Netherlands or Great Britain.³¹

An education in the metropole was an important step towards equality within the colonial hierarchy with the white Europeans. In the Indies, as well as in Senegal, creole elites had always been part of this colonial migration circuit and they continued to dominate this circuit well into the twentieth century. The situation became markedly different in British India, where hundreds of Indian students, mostly from a comprador and notably Parsee background, went to England from the late nineteenth century onwards.³²

Whether creole or Parsee, Brahmin, or African, their experiences were essentially identical. It was refreshing to be in a relatively liberal society in which darker complexion did not make one constantly prey to discrimination, though metropolitan society was not free of prejudice either, of course.³³ And after returning home, there might have been a difference in intensity of feeling, but the mechanism of not being accepted by white colonial society in spite of excellent intellectual credentials was basically the same.

Education in the metropole increased the sense of belonging to a dominated nation, whereas at the same time it strengthened the old comprador tradition of reformist opposition with the concrete, and personal, experience that the mother country, and its democratic institutions, was more enlightened than the colonial state. Naoroji, the father of the drainage theory, is the most notable example of an early nationalist who tried to use these institutes as a platform to argue for colonial reform. As a former businessman in London, he was one of the three Parsees from Bombay who made it into the British parliament in the nineteenth century.³⁴

Another example is that of the Senegalese Blaise Diagne, who entered, as the first African deputy, the French parliament in 1914, notwithstanding the fact that his French citizenship was sharply contested. Even Gandhi, who in South Africa had become sharply aware of the fact that the very existence of the colonial state relegated Indians to second-rate subjects of the empire, still considered empire to be a potentially progressive entity which could set standards against racial prejudice and economic exploitation.³⁵ With the benefit of hindsight, such an attachment to this type of polity might sound quaint, but we have to take into account that in those years empires were still the dominant type of polities. It was believed that they still had a future ahead, with an increasing interdependence between their constituent parts. Consistent with that, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands adopted laws that drastically improved access to metropolitan citizenship for imperial subjects during the First World War, when the loyalty of colonial subjects was a precious asset.³⁶

the young ones and the new age

According to Benedict Anderson, one should distinguish between the European “Young” movements of the nineteenth century, like Young Italy or Young Ireland, and the twentieth-century Young movements like Young Java or Young Sumatra. The latter he considers to be a response to newly introduced European education and way of life at the turn of the century.³⁷

However, raising this binary would immediately throw up the question of in what basket to put the Padang “Young” we discussed earlier. If we decided that the Padang Movement was nineteenth-century European, there would be no reason to treat the Young Bengal movement of the 1830s differently. But such historiographical amputations of the Indian nationalist trajectory have already been refuted by Chatterjee. I would argue therefore that the Padang Movement of the 1870s belongs to Indonesian history as it directly impinged upon the emergence of the vernacular press. A straight line runs from here via the father of Indonesian journalism Tirtoadisoerjo—immortalized by Pramoedya Ananta Toer in his novels—to Islamic debates about the right political order. Though I subscribe to the view that Young Java is part of what Anderson calls a “tradition of Javanese non-conformism,” I do not understand why it should be isolated from the nineteenth-century creole political tradition.³⁸ On the contrary, precisely because of their iconoclastic attitude towards colonial authority and indigenous tradition, “Young” movements crossed belief systems and colonial ethnic boundaries and were part of improved global communications.³⁹

Instead of assuming that the emerging “Young” movements simply replaced nineteenth-century comprador anti-imperialism, I would suggest considering creole nationalism—that is, the struggle for citizens' rights by a motley assembly of comprador classes—as a continuously broadening movement. Let me repeat that the scheme of two types of nationalism (creole and cultural) has been contested by Partha Chatterjee through a well-documented narrative that links the Bengal intellectual renaissance to late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century anti-imperialism. In the case of colonial Java, I want to explore how creole anti-imperialist discourses opened up to become emerging nationalism. To illuminate the crucial moments in this process I will draw upon some comparisons with Senegal.

The entry point is that Java offers an outstanding example of how the dichotomy between colonial modernity and indigenous tradition was constructed, and maintained, by the colonial state with almost incredible care.⁴⁰

In the first decade of the twentieth century, both spheres were permeated, and bound together, by the same political economy of the world's second-largest producer of cane sugar.⁴¹ To read traditional as pre-capitalist and self-sufficient would be a gross understatement of Java's involvement in the world market, its ensuing monetization, and the popular protests which sought to negotiate with the colonial state. The semi-independent rulers of Central Java, usually referred to as the icons of Java's cultural identity, were deeply involved in the sugar industrial complex of Java. The plantation economy had enabled them to resurrect their courts, which were all but ruined in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Rituals in which colonial officers, creole estate owners, and Javanese nobles all played their role helped to shore up the courts' prestige over a heavily exploited population.⁴² The pomp and ceremony that was invented to display the modern and traditional spheres was to demonstrate the legitimacy of the political economy of sugar production. On the other hand, the absorption in the world sugar market ensured the Javanese rulers their degree of independence within the colonial empire. It is neither coincidental nor ironical that the Sultan's court of Yogyakarta, which had benefited most from the colonial sugar economy, became the place where some of the most important early nationalists came from.

The word “tradition” suggests an unconquered territory, whereas this Javanese space had actually already been encapsulated in—if not created by and being an active part of—the colonial economy. It would be naïve to consider cultural conservatism as just an “authentic” force and not as part of the plantation economy that had been established in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the link between “cultural authenticity” and colonial interests continued to be close. In the early twentieth century the colonial authorities, with their scholarly trained specialists in the front lines, fostered “Javaneseness” and “Chineseness,” which was even adopted by the cultural elites themselves.⁴³

In addition, colonial authorities accepted, and in the case of the Dutch East Indies even encouraged, the emergence of a cultural, and thus “authentic,” national awareness as part of their colonial mission. They were, however, determined to combat the creole political discourse, which they considered to be an alien element in the history of the people whom they had colonized.⁴⁴

It is in this light that we should read the early nationalist words on the “regeneration of traditional cultures through Western knowledge.” The word “regeneration” apparently accommodated the colonial policy, though in fact it contained a political request to bring down the fences of colonial dualism, dividing (European) citizens and (native) subjects. It entailed a hidden threat as everyone knew that this sleeping Asian beauty, usually portrayed as the slender aristocratic Raden Adjeng Kartini, the female symbol of early Javanese nationalism, represented the masses of Asia: what would happen if she woke up angrily! As a matter of fact, the simultaneously emerging neo-Confucianist movement of the Indo-Chinese, or peranakan, elite reveals this threat even better than the Javanese case does. While China made its presence felt in the Indies from1907 onwards, sending its gunboats to Java's harbors, the peranakan boasted about the sovereignty of their Chinese homeland and conjured up their Chineseness. But in spite of that the neo-Confucianist movement in colonial Indonesia was unmistakably directed at the confines of colonial dualism. The peranakan movement's immediate point of reference was the Japanese, who had already become equals to the Europeans before the law in 1898.⁴⁵

In sum, these cultural and/or religious renaissance movements emerged in a heavily syncretized environment and were struggling against colonial dualism, broadening their horizon and not just in the “Western” direction. The universal message of Eastern spirituality, which we know so well from Rabindranath Tagore, was advanced as a two-sided struggle: against the cultural arrogance of the West and against the dead weight of tradition. In India, but particularly in colonial Indonesia, theosophy became a rallying point for those who sought a higher consciousness. The colonial rulers' sense of mission was considered to be a materialistic and vulgarized interpretation of Christianity and it was part of early nationalist discourse to “take Jesus back for the East”—a direct response to claims of Western moral superiority. Since the interaction between nineteenth-century European metaphysics and reappraisals of Hindu and Buddhist tradition has been detailed elsewhere, it will suffice to mention that creole and Javanese intellectuals were fully aware of these debates and some of them had read their Max Müller.⁴⁶

What strikes us in this early nationalist discourse is its frantic search for a superior holistic intellectual position, which could relegate the grammar of colonial domination to lower intellectual echelons. However, these attempts to “provincialize” had direct political relevance, since they were an answer to the conservative swing in colonial policies of the major colonial powers Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France in the first years of the twentieth century. The French government in Senegal and the Dutch in the Indies had embarked upon a project of indigenizing equality and tried to undo “accidental” citizenship in the name of equity. The “middle classes” had become suspiciously privileged in the eyes of the colonial authorities. The partition of Bengal in 1905 by Lord Curzon had more or less the same effect as it came on top of a rejection of modest requests for more education and aggravated political frustration about racial injustice.⁴⁷

Modern colonial policies basically wanted to undo the advanced position in the empire of the comprador classes, an attempt that was cloaked in terms of metropolitan responsibility for the nations under their tutelage. Thus the “new age” spirit helped to expose Western parochialism, and its evolutionist view on history which supported its colonial hegemony. The last years before the First World War were marked by an unbridled optimism that the brotherhood of man could be attained, if racial prejudice and economic exploitation by metropolitan interest groups could be overcome.⁴⁸ In the Dutch East Indies this resulted in a political consensus among progressive imperialists, creoles, and educated Javanese that colonial dualism, or the classical binary between citizen and subject, was untenable.

the creole nexus

I have argued that in intellectual terms the nineteenth-century political traditions of the colonial comprador or “middle classes” and the “Young” movement are inseparable. But as for colonial Indonesia, it is equally impossible to claim a rupture in terms of agency. Creole newspapers extended their readership to lower-class creoles, or Indo-Europeans (Indos) as they were called by that time, and took the lead in attacking colonial dualism. The Indo classes' anti-imperialism was a strange mixture of patriotism (“Indië voor de Indiërs”), class consciousness, and of populist resistance to the political economy. Like other comprador classes, the Indos felt deeply grieved by the discriminatory practices of colonial rule, and their grievances were astutely worded by their press.

Creole journalists played a crucial role in forging an alliance between the “Young Javanese” and the lower-class creoles. And Java was not a singular case, as a similar process had been taking place in Senegal, and with rather spectacular success. The creole politician François Carpot had been able to enlist the support of the originaires, the African citizens of the Quatre Communes, to wrestle from the Bordeaux commercial interest group the deputyship in the French parliament in 1902. In subsequent years, the newspapers' hot-headed style of ridiculing the ways in which metropolitan interests were favored culminated in the audacity of the Young Senegalese and their creole journalist allies to deride even the emblem of colonial authority, the governor-general.⁴⁹

Their creole counterparts in the Indies likewise acted as selling points for creole political traditions. Particularly in colonial Batavia, the press provided the link between the creole political tradition and early Indonesian nationalists, as has been admirably narrated by Pramoedya Ananta Toer in his novels on the Indonesian journalist Tirtoadisoerjo. Batavia's popular creole press not only expressed its solidarity with the Young Javanese but also offered Tirtoadisoerjo his formative years as a journalist.⁵⁰

Eventually, in 1912, this “creole-young” nexus became embodied in the famous triumvirate of Ernest Douwes Dekker, Cipto Mangunkusumo, and Suwardi Surya Ningrat, who created their Indies Party after the example of the Indian National Congress and Bengali resistance to the partition.⁵¹

The creole journalist Douwes Dekker personalized the relationship between the nineteenth-century creole tradition and a new generation of Indonesian leaders as he became close friends with Sukarno, Indonesia's first president, and Husni Thamrin, the key figure of cooperative Indonesian nationalism in the last decade before Japanese occupation. Douwes Dekker began his remarkable nationalist curriculum a few years after he was released from Sri Lanka, where he had been detained as a prisoner of war by the British. He had been captured while fighting with the Boers against British jingoism. In 1908 he was already a man of “ill repute” for publicly washing the dirty colonial laundry of the Aceh war in the journal of the German Socialist Party.⁵² In the next two years his reputation as an uncompromising opponent of colonial domination, and friend—and mentor—of the Young Javanese, was established when he acted as editor of the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, the largest Dutch-language newspaper at the time. In 1909 he succeeded in rallying Javanese, Chinese, Eurasian, and progressive colonial bureaucrats in a movement for a university in the Indies. One year later he left for a Grand Tour, which gave him the opportunity to interview the Bengali nationalist and staunch Spencerian Shyamaji Krishnavarma, who called for an absolutely free and independent form of national government and who taught his followers that there was no way in which colonial rule could stand the passive resistance of their colonial subjects.⁵³ The Bengali extremist lectures on boycotts, strikes—and if necessary violence—completed Douwes Dekker's anti-imperialist education.⁵⁴

Like his contemporaries in Senegal, Douwes Dekker tried to forge an alliance between the educated indigenous population and the lower-class creoles. His task was, however, far more complicated than Carpot's, who had enjoyed the luxury of a pre-defined political community. Carpot could work along existing patterns and promised to fight for the Africanization of the civil service and the addition of eight new “communes” to the four that already existed.⁵⁵

In fact, his task was eventually accomplished by Blaise Diagne, who aptly used Carpot's alliance of originaires (the African citizens of the Quatre Communes) and “petit colons” to become the first African to secure a seat in the French parliament in 1914. But when Douwes Dekker founded the Indies Party in 1912, he had to define a new political community, one that would wash away the common references to race, ethnicity, social category, language, and culture. He faced the daunting task of crossing the border that had become more or less fossilized since the implementation of civil registration for Christians and Jews in 1828. He cleverly addressed this problem by giving a sharp political edge to old debates about access to the Indies civil service and liberal professions and by stating that his movement's quest for universities in the Indies was to enable its people to take over the reigns from their colonizer.⁵⁶ In addition, Douwes Dekker and his friends Cipto Mangunkusumo and Suwardi Surya Ningrat skillfully twisted the Dutch colonial discourse on economic autonomy and self-reliance to a discourse on freedom, culminating in the first public claim of an independent existence for the Indies people.⁵⁷ Almost forty years later, Sukarno would honor his friend Douwes Dekker as one of the fathers of Indonesian nationalism. But drawing on the Senegalese comparison one might arrive at the more sober interpretation that in 1912 Douwes Dekker's radical nationalist stance was predicated on his political ambition to cross the fossilized colonial ethnic boundaries.

The Indies Party was quickly suppressed, condemned by the colonial government as a political organization that did not represent the interests of the Javanese people. Like Benedict Anderson, the Indies government suggested that with his creole nationalism Douwes Dekker would never be able to relate to Indonesians' true self.⁵⁸

The colonial government's real motives, however, were to prevent the Indies Party inculcating itself into the rapidly emerging mass movement Sarekat Islam. Support for the political agenda of the Indies Party was widespread among Young Javanese. This was demonstrated when Suwardi continued to campaign and published his famous pamphlet “If I were a Dutchman. . . .” It appeared in August 1913, on the occasion of the centennial celebrations of the Dutch liberation from Napoleon, and asked for the parliamentary institutions that the Dutch had already acquired. It received such a warm welcome among Javanese intellectuals that the colonial government decided to ban the Indies Party triumvirate. Anderson has cited this pamphlet to argue that the nationalist intellectual Suwardi, writing in Dutch, turned Dutch history against the colonizer, and to visualize the contradictory aspects of what Stoler and Cooper later on would term the “embourgeoisement of imperialism.”⁵⁹ Suwardi did not, however, ask the Dutch to leave, at least not immediately, but to first introduce their democratic institutions in the Indies. In 1940 the same Suwardi urged the Indonesian nationalist leader Husni Thamrin to bury his controversies with the colonial government and to side with democracy against fascism.⁶⁰

To date, historians have had a problem giving the Indies Party its proper place in Indonesian national history. Shiraishi is one notable exception; another—though not a historian—was Sukarno, who, again, honored Douwes Dekker as one of the fathers of Indonesian nationalism in 1949. For a balanced perspective it is important, however, to acknowledge that in 1912 the Indies Party triumvirate still believed that the empire was an institution open to progressive reform, and therefore a relevant political entity in their struggle. Douwes Dekker himself was a player of the imperial arena, rather unconcerned about the banning of his political movement and the extradition of himself and his two Indonesian political associates. He had procured the help of the Dutch social democrats, who were expected to become part of a new left-wing government at the next election. Though this did not happen, the elections brought a more progressive government to power, which induced the Indies government to reconsider the constitutional binary between indigenous and European subjects and to consider the idea of popular representation in the colonial institutions. Douwes Dekker had played his imperial card shrewdly and achieved a resounding victory.

Neither the Dutch government nor Douwes Dekker and his friends seriously contemplated voting rights for the subaltern and uneducated masses of Indonesians; instead they continued the nineteenth-century discourse of a gradual extension of citizenship, which would, according to the Indies Party, create a new multi-ethnic “middle class.”⁶¹

In that respect, and in contrast to Latin America, creole nationalism in Indonesia never became revolutionary, but it did become very conscious of the gap between elites and masses. Whereas in Latin American countries formal democracy co-existed, and co-exists, with enormous social inequality, the fathers of Indonesian nationalism were sharply aware of the fact that political emancipation needs a social and economic basis.

the great war and the empire

The War revolutionized, and thus problematized, the idea of a gradually widening citizenship. It also gave the imperial political structure a central role in shaping the early nationalist trajectories. The “levée en masse” or general conscription came on top of the colonial political agendas. Until then, the nexus between militia and citizenship had existed only in the local setting of the colonial boroughs and plantation societies. Colonial state and general conscription were simply incommensurable concepts. Imperial considerations, however, forced colonial governments to grudgingly accept, at least in theory, the idea of national defense. In India, West Africa, and colonial Indonesia the discourse followed the same republican principle that those who shed their blood should be given the status of citizen.⁶²

And this equation worked both ways, as was made clear by Gandhi, who emphasized that his claim to be a citizen of the empire also entailed participation in its defense. He not only supported mobilization, “to give Empire every available man for its defence,” he even offered his own services, as he had done twelve years before when he had been at the same South African battlefield as Douwes Dekker, though on the other side.⁶³ While large numbers of Indian troops were deployed in Europe, the nationalists back home could rightfully claim that it was unacceptable to be comrades in arms and helots in politics.⁶⁴ Meanwhile, to achieve his objective of French citizenship for the Africans of West Africa Diagne personally organized the recruitment of 60,000 African soldiers for the French army. It brought him immense personal prestige as the French government conferred on him the title of Commissioner-General, a rank as high as Governor-General. But even more important was that it established the principle among his fellow West Africans that those “who paid the blood tax” should not be denied their citizen rights.⁶⁵

The particular importance of this claim lies in the fact that it transcends the individual “quid pro quo” and transfers the rights stemming from the individually paid “blood tax” to a nation in the making. The Dutch East Indies provide another case in point. Though the Netherlands was neutral and stayed out of the war, it was felt that Japan was developing into an imminent danger for the Indies. Moreover, the Indies Party had already made conscription part of its anti-imperialist agenda by propagating a people's militia as an alternative to the government's maritime defense policies: “no dreadnoughts but a people's militia.”⁶⁶

At the 1916 mass meetings rallying around the theme of “Indië Weerbaar” [the Indies ready and able], militia and citizenship were openly espoused. The Indonesian mass movement Sarekat Islam seized the opportunity to wheedle recognition as a political party from the colonial government, which had hitherto accepted this movement only as an expression of cultural nationalism and social solidarity.⁶⁷ Now, the vice-chairman of Sarekat Islam and member of the “Indië Weerbaar” delegation to the Dutch parliament, Abdul Muis, could openly declare that his objective was to prepare for an autonomous existence of the Indies people.⁶⁸

It had been the creole political tradition that had shaped the syncretist platform against colonial conservatism and had now brought colonial subjects into imperial politics. The imperiled empires offered the floor to syncretist political leaders like Blaise Diagne, who, as a matter of fact, was a Catholic, freemason, and married to a French woman. In colonial Indonesia it was the secretary of the East Indies branch of the Theosophical Society D. J. van Hinloopen Labberton who introduced his Javanese friends into the militia debate, while his boss Annie Besant presided at the Indian National Congress in 1917.

Simultaneous theosophical victories were followed by simultaneous defeats. Van Hinloopen Labberton soon became ostracized by European public opinion and Besant was jailed shortly after her finest political moment. Their downfall marked the end of the remarkable last two years of the World War in which empire and home rule were in balance. The Dutch East Indies experienced a unique interlude between the announcement of the establishment of the People's Council in 1916 and the so-called “November promises” of 1918. In the revolutionary days of late 1918 governor-general J. P. Count van Limburg Stirum put his colonial administration on a trajectory towards self-government for the Indies. As a career diplomat he was more attuned to international developments than to metropolitan feelings. His promise was almost literally copied from Montagu's declaration that he would steer toward a “progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British empire.”⁶⁹

nationalist pathology or broken promises?

By the end of the War the creole nationalist promise of a gradual extension of citizenship to all colonial subjects seemed to be more realistic than ever. But so imminent as its victory appeared during the First World War, so quickly did its prospect vanish in the decade to come. The imbalances of the world economy foreclosed a continuing equilibrium between autonomy and empire, between universalism and patriotism. The philosophical contradiction of rewarding colonial subjects for their imperial loyalty by granting them responsible governments became a real threat to the future of the imperial idea. The atmosphere soon turned sour and became filled with genuine disappointment about the expectations raised during the War.

The role of the syncretist mediators was over, but it would be imprecise to claim that they were squeezed by a “clash of civilizations” between religious or ethnically inspired mass nationalism and colonial domination. The Indies creole population admittedly retreated to a position of “white” supremacy, but not because of anxiety about Islam as a social force.⁷⁰

Islamic movements had already been active in nineteenth-century Java, and allegedly played a role in the many rebellions in the countryside. In that respect the early twentieth century showed a marked contrast in that Sarekat Islam had maintained a fairly cordial relationship with the Indies government during its first years of existence. Relations between Sarekat Islam and the colonial government rapidly deteriorated after the War—not because of a process of “othering,” but as a result of a fierce economic struggle. It was not a time for politics of identity, but of anti-colonialism in which one could be communist and Muslim at the same time.⁷¹ Islam in Indonesia did not retreat into patriarchal fundamentalism, as happened for instance in Syria and Lebanon.⁷²

The political repression in the Dutch East Indies after the War had its own specific harshness because of the colony's political economy. From the 1880s to the late 1920s the sugar industry was the most powerful actor in colonial Indonesia.⁷³

By the end of the First World War, the Java sugar industry had become a tightly intertwined group of about 180 factories and metropolitan financial interests, and its joint economic muscle was brought together in an organization with the ominous name of Sugar Syndicate. Its organizational discipline allowed the sugar industry to buy any newspaper it wanted, establish a counter-Sarekat Islam, and to smother any voice that doubted the blessings of its presence.⁷⁴ The aggressive sugar interests played a crucial role in wielding together the concepts of anti-capitalism and nationalism, and relating them to Islamic concepts of social justice, as has been demonstrated by Shiraishi.⁷⁵ His painstaking analysis of how the popular and radical Javanese leader Hadji Misbach placed colonial capitalism under the scrutiny of Allah and Marx in his series of newspaper articles in 1924 shows how Islam was invoked as a moral standard to denounce colonial capitalism. The rejection of this “sinful capitalism” should obviously not be conflated with a struggle of Islam against the West.⁷⁶

No doubt, the fierce struggle between the powerful sugar industry and nationalism sets the Indonesian anti-imperialist trajectory apart from those of British India and Senegal. Whereas the emerging police state was a general feature of late colonial societies, in colonial Indonesia it was part and parcel of the sugar economy. Its first victim was Douwes Dekker's reincarnated Indies Party of 1913, which had adopted the name of the National Indies Party (NIP), or Sarekat Hindia. This party could boast a consolidated class base in Batavia, Semarang, and Ambon, when in May 1919 it became embroiled in local struggles in the countryside of the principalities in Central Java as the result of its popular local leader Hadji Misbach. Rather accidentally, the central leadership had found itself in a position mediating between plantation managers and peasant resistance to forced labor. Later on, in 1919, Suwardi succeeded in merging the National Indies Party, Sarekat Islam, and the Indonesian sugar labor union in a unified front. Resistance in the principalities became massive, and the poor Sunan (ruler) of Surakarta was ridiculed by the NIP leadership as the pitiful puppet of colonial exploitation, a disgrace to his ancestors, the glorious emperors of Java.⁷⁷

This was too much for the Indies government, which clamped down on the leaders of the National Indies Party, and forced them to disentangle themselves from social radicalism.

Since Robert van Niel's classic The Emergence of the Modern Indonesian Elite it has been accepted as a fact that the “hybrid” National Indies Party was prone to disintegration in an age of mass nationalism.⁷⁸

I would argue the opposite, namely that the NIP became the first victim of government repression for the very reason that it so successfully bridged the gap between elites and masses. This argument gets some additional weight from the fact that the Indies Party became a mass movement in the most heavily syncretized areas of colonial Indonesia, namely the principalities of Java, the Moluccas, and later on in the mining regions of West Sumatra. Historians like Van Niel have apparently followed the opinions of white and creole society. These contemporaries found their beliefs in a cognitive distance between elites and masses vindicated, as they, wrongly, concluded that populists could incite the ignorant masses for whatever cause.⁷⁹ But this was the sugar factories' propaganda, in which the colonial authorities eventually began to believe in these years of the return of the white-man's-burden discourse. To counter the “individualist and elitist” citizens' rights claims, the colonial powers resumed their indigenist discourse. They could thus legitimate their jailing of “Westernized and populist leaders” to stop them “misleading the masses.” Our present knowledge about the heavy handed sugar interests throws a new light on the general assumption that creole political mobilization was a partial and inherently conservative, transitional moment to nationalism.

No doubt, there were partial and conservative tendencies in late colonial comprador politics, which were a consequence of elite competition for scarce jobs, resources, and education facilities. The Dutch East Indies were not unique in this respect as more or less the same dynamics were in play in Bengal in the same years.⁸⁰

Here, the local elites, the bhadralok, became wary of the British colonial government's overtures to the Bengal Muslim majority for fear of losing their entitlements to education and jobs.⁸¹ Likewise, elite competition for scarce resources induced Douwes Dekker's former rank and file to become colonial conservatives. Every step towards granting passive or active voting rights led to an increase in the power of Indonesians at the expense of the creoles. This mechanism explains the rise, and particularly the moment of ascendancy, of the so-called Eurasian League that was founded in Batavia in 1919.⁸² The creole population rallied to it in 1921, when declining sugar prices and heavy pressure from colonial enterprise forced the Indies government to implement severe cuts in education spending and government salaries.

At the ideological level, however, creole nationalism outlived the pioneering role of creole or comprador classes in nationalism. To write that the creoles retreated into their own ethnic isolation and Indonesian nationalist leaders followed their counterparts in India on the road to non-cooperation is to tell only part of the story, perhaps even the least interesting part. The early 1920s witnessed a general shift in Indonesia from mass movements first to parliamentary and subsequently educational concerns. The leaders of the National Indies Party switched from social radicalism back to parliamentarism in 1920. The Bandung All Indies Congress of June 1922, organized by Douwes Dekker, marked the shift from political action to the education of the masses in democratic citizenship. Suwardi Surya Ningrat began to build his Taman Siswo school program, which was based upon theosophical principles and became a model for the so-called “Wild Schools” teaching Dutch to thousands of young Indonesians. I will return to this presently.⁸³

The Wild Schools stepped into the space that the austerity policies of the colonial government had left and took up the Dutch curriculum. Indeed, though the nationalist leaders professed their preference for Malay as the national language for Indonesia in 1928, the people asked for Dutch because it was still the most prestigious language. However politically correct the vernaculars might have been, they were of academic interest to the immediate future of the nationalist movement.⁸⁴

creole nationalism retreated but not defeated

Nationalist movements had to cope with the new political configuration of postwar colonialism, which had effectively blocked the reformist agenda of extending citizenship within the imperial framework. The complete failure of elite cooperation in colonial Indonesia has been printed in bold since Furnivall's famous work on the plural society of Netherlands India.⁸⁵

After the First World War the Indies government imposed a pacification scheme by allowing the political representation of Chinese, Ambonese, Javanese, Sumatrans, civil service, labor unions—and last but not least private enterprise—in municipal councils and the People's Council. From the above, it may be clear that this only exacerbated confrontation. However, I have also argued that in the aftermath of the First World War political developments did not trivialize creole nationalism but forced it to return to its educational concerns.

Furnivall's theory of plural society is the way in which colonial authorities wanted to perceive reality, as neatly categorized ethnicities each represented in compliance with its particular stage of evolution in the imperial political structure. But in spite of the increasing geographical segregation of white suburbs in colonial cities and an increasing number of colonial enclaves with expatriate specialists and their wives, the percentage of marriages between Europeans and Indonesian and Chinese women had been steadily rising since the nineteenth century, to peak at 27.5 percent in 1925. These facts oblige us to differentiate between economic and political polarization on the one hand and a process of cultural and social convergence on the other. The mastering of Dutch became the emblem of the nationalist school movement and spread so rapidly that by 1930 about 4 percent of urban populations had some command of Dutch—with peaks of 13 percent in the Christian areas of Ambon and Minahasa—a percentage that would increase considerably in the decade to come.⁸⁶

According to estimates by Kees Groeneboer, in 1942 about 1.3 million people (2 percent of the entire population) spoke Dutch (excluding the expatriate Dutch), while an additional 1 percent had some knowledge of the language. The position of Dutch in the East Indies was thus exactly the same as English in British India, and we cannot rule out the possibility that Dutch spread more rapidly, since in 1941 about 230,000 pupils were learning Dutch at Wild Schools.⁸⁷ It was not until the Japanese conquest that the expansion of the Dutch language was brought to an end.

In fact, the oxymoron of simultaneous polarization and convergence was such that it has led to a debate on whether the Netherlands Indies were a plural society, according to Furnivall, or surprisingly tolerant regarding matters of race, according to Kennedy.⁸⁸

We have to bear in mind that during the interwar years about 65–70 percent of the 240,000 Europeans in the colony had been born in the Indies. In the 1920s they had been unable to express their sense of belonging in the way they could in the late nineteenth century and in the days of Douwes Dekker's Indies Party, since newspapers, and public opinion, were controlled by colonial business interests. However, the economic crisis of the 1930s weakened precisely the position of these very interests that had been blocking the institutional reform that could have done justice to the social realities of the emerging Indonesian nation.

One could say that in the course of the 1930s the veracity of Kennedy's view became more apparent than Furnivall's. In this climate the idea of a multi-ethnic citizenry could resurface. In 1937 the creole physician Dr. W.C.A. Doeve, a prominent Eurasian League member, argued that Dutch colonial government was blind to socially and culturally converging patterns: “I believe it is high time that the intellectual non-Dutch and Dutch who consider the Indies as their fatherland were united in a single Netherlands-Indies citizenry.”⁸⁹

Though ambiguous about the nationality of this citizenry, he was firm about the desirability of merging assimilated indigenous subjects and patriotic creoles into a single citizenry. Interestingly enough, he supported his argument for an “Indies Citizenship” project by alluding to Javanese children from the humblest social segments chatting in Dutch in the streets.⁹⁰ The generally unquestioned cognitive distance between elites and masses was ridiculed in 1939 by V.W.Ch Ploegman, another prominent member of the Eurasian League. He took the daring step of entitling one of his public speeches “Because East and West Meet.” He negated the wisdom of an entire army of colonial specialists, including J. H. Boeke (the father of the concept of economic dualism), with the simple truism that all societies change and thus can homogenize or grow apart.⁹¹ These voices in the Eurasian League by the late 1930s demonstrate how much the articulation of ideas of belonging and citizenship was predicated upon the colonial political economy. The voice of the creoles of Indonesia had been subdued in the 1920s, but their belief in a gradual extension of imperial citizenship had never died.

conclusion

Our rejection of the analytical distinction between creole and cultural or linguistic nationalism brought us into the fuzzy territory of historically contextualized narratives on anti-imperialist movements. But under the surface of many smaller and greater struggles, we can perceive a striking resilience of an old republican tradition, which became philosophically deepened and ethnically widened as it absorbed the discourses from Bengal, of the pan-Islamic movement and of Marxism. Around 1900, resistance to the emerging colonial state did not reciprocate the jingoist discourse of the metropole, but found the higher ground of a universal position. Likewise, the increasing repression of the interwar years did not lead to an indigenist reaction. On the contrary, the rapid spread of the colonizers' language by the nationalist movement proved the resilience of creole nationalism as it lived on in the Indonesian nationalist education project.

What remains is the question why so little of this history has stamped its mark upon modern Indonesia. The first part of the answer lies in the fact that history writing is not something done by detached historians, but begins immediately when contesting parties begin to interpret the course of events in their own way. The second is that more than 90 percent of the creoles and Dutch expatriates left the country after 1945. There was fierce resistance from Minahasa and Ambon, the most Dutchified parts of the archipelago, to the postcolonial state.⁹²

The traumatic events from the Japanese occupation onwards to the communist witch-hunt of 1965 have victimized exactly those segments that were closest to creole nationalism. Just a few months before this repression, Ruth McVey, in her classic monograph, claimed the Indonesian Communist Party was the largest communist movement outside the Soviet-Sino bloc.⁹³ The year 1965 was not only an immense human tragedy, it also destroyed a sense of historicity and the intellectual repository from which postcolonial reflections could take place. These events amply explain the tendency to give undue weight to the fact that the new Republic of Indonesia did not inherit Dutch as an official language. This language would have disappeared from Indonesia in the new Anglophone world anyway. The hub of the matter is that the proliferation of Dutch in the final years of colonial Indonesia was not part of a colonial project, but a marker of the Indonesian struggle for citizenship and a demonstration of the historical continuity of a nationalist trajectory rooted far back in the nineteenth century.