Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- A note on spelling, pronunciation and names
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 Our colonial soil
- 2 Cultures of the countryside
- 3 ‘To assail the colonial machine’
- 4 The Revolution
- 5 Living in the atomic age
- 6 From Old to New Orders
- 7 Terror and development in happy land
- 8 Age of globalisation, age of crisis
- Biographies of key figures
- Abbreviations and glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- LIST OF MODERN HISTORIES
4 - The Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- A note on spelling, pronunciation and names
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 Our colonial soil
- 2 Cultures of the countryside
- 3 ‘To assail the colonial machine’
- 4 The Revolution
- 5 Living in the atomic age
- 6 From Old to New Orders
- 7 Terror and development in happy land
- 8 Age of globalisation, age of crisis
- Biographies of key figures
- Abbreviations and glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- LIST OF MODERN HISTORIES
Summary
People died or lived, just like pebbles that got caught in a sieve.
And I was like a grain of sand that escaped.
Javanese former forced labourer Damin, aka Mbah UbiFor Indonesians World War Two and their subsequent national Revolution started optimistically, kicked off by the enthusiasm of being liberated from the Dutch by the Japanese. Pramoedya Ananta Toer recalled the arrival of the Emperor's forces in Blora in 1942. The Japanese had swept rapidly through the Indies early in March, and people came to meet their army, waving flags and shouting their support for the liberators from the Dutch. ‘With the arrival of the Japanese just about everyone in town was full of hope, except for those who had worked in the service of the Dutch.’
But looking back on his experience as a teenager witnessing the arrival of the Japanese, Pramoedya added, with acrimony arising from his subsequent experiences, ‘there was a bad smell about the whole thing, a stench that rose from the bodies of the Japanese soldiers.’ The shouts of ‘Japan is our older brother’ and ‘banzai Dai Nippon’ would soon be replaced by bitterness. Tens of thousands of Indonesians were to starve, work as slave labourers, be forced from their homes, and die in brutal hand-to-hand conflict before Indonesian sovereignty could be achieved. It took more than four years from when Independence was proclaimed in 1945 for the Dutch to transfer sovereignty to the Indonesians, and even then many Indonesians like Pramoedya were not satisfied with the result.
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- Information
- A History of Modern Indonesia , pp. 85 - 112Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005