On 11 August 1986, as Dr Frederick George Peter Jaquet cycled from Den Haag to his office in Leiden, no one would have guessed that he was transporting an Indonesian national treasure. The wooden box strapped to his bicycle looked perfectly ordinary. When he arrived at the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, the scholar opened the box to view the Institute's long-awaited prize: a cache of postcards, photographs, and scraps of letters sent by Raden Adjeng Kartini and her sisters to the family of Mr J.H. Abendanon, the colonial official who was both her patron and publisher. From this box so grudgingly surrendered by Abendanon's family spilled new light on the life of this Javanese nobleman's daughter, new clues to the mystery of her struggle.

Dr Jaquet's discovery, glowingly reported in the Indonesian press, was but the latest episode in a long series of attempts to liberate Kartini from the boxes which have contained her. For decades, Indonesian and foreign scholars alike have sought to penetrate the veils obscuring the real Kartini in order to reach the core of a personality repressed by colonial officials, Dutch artists and intellectuals, the strictures of tradition, and the tragedy of her untimely death. The promise and the mystery of Kartini have given rise to a fluorescence of questions on all aspects of her life. Why did she give up her plans to go to Holland? Did she really predict her own death? Was she a feminist or a nationalist? Is Indonesia living up to her dreams? President Suharto's pronouncement notwithstanding, Kartini has sparked a conversation which seems unlikely to cease.

Whence the enthusiasm, the obsession with Kartini? From her birth on 21 April 1879 to her death in childbirth in 1904, Kartini scarcely ventured beyond the borders of the community in which she was raised. When she died, she left little behind except a handful of essays and a series of letters written to Dutch pen pals during the last four years of her life.

Introduction

Luisa Passerini writes about the paradox of memory (and, we can add, forgetting) that we cannot look for something we lost unless we remember it at least in part (Passerini 2003, p. 239). When investigating cultural memory of colonialism in Europe, a first impression many people have is one of silence in the sense of oblivion (Ricoeur 2004): colonialism, in this conception, has vanished without a trace. In the Netherlands, people have claimed that Dutch colonialism in Indonesia is not taught in high schools, not talked about in the media, that photographs of colonial atrocities committed by the Dutch colonial army have been swept under the carpet and that the voices of those once colonized by the Dutch are never heard in the Netherlands. Yet if we investigate specific places and communities, a different picture emerges: histories of Dutch colonialism have been part of the school exams since the 1970s, colonial “scandals” (e.g. abusive labour conditions of coolies in colonial Indonesia) have been reported upon in newspapers since the nineteenth century, photographs of colonial atrocities were widely published and distributed in the early twentieth century, and the Netherlands has a rich tradition of publishing Indonesian authors, both originally writing in Dutch and in translation (Bijl 2012, 2015). How can we account for this impression of silence and this abundance of sounds?

In this Chapter, analysing current cultural memories of Kartini in Dutch contexts, I will argue that in investigating silences we need to pay attention to location as both sounds and silences are always unevenly distributed: while in certain locations there can be almost a cacophony of sounds, in others utter silence can be encountered. Second, I want to show how silences, once they have occurred or been produced, change position and meaning over time, sometimes being perpetuated and repeated, sometimes changing character as they move across contexts. By investigating these two aspects, I want to draw attention to silence's spatial (synchronic) and temporal (diachronic) dimensions. In this Chapter, I will mainly focus on a prize named after Kartini which has been awarded in the city of The Hague since 2001 to stimulate emancipation of, at first, Dutch women of colour but eventually, at least in theory, everybody contributing to the emancipation of anybody. Silence as a phenomenon can be connected in two ways to this prize, one spatial, the other temporal.

The contributors to this volume deliver us a striking paradox. Internationally, Kartini ranks just after Anne Frank as the best known of authors who wrote in the Dutch language. But in the Netherlands today she is barely known or read. In Indonesia, Kartini is barely read but widely known. Kartini has a rich afterlife in hundreds of articles, speeches and exhibitions. UNESCO sponsored translations into English and French of some of her letters for its Collection of Representative Works of world literature. She is the heroine of at least two feature-length films. A national day is dedicated to her in Indonesia when her name is invoked in recognition of women's achievements. All this while, the letters she wrote and by which she was launched into transnational consciousness remain largely unread.

What we have here, as this book makes very clear, is that the historical personage has transmogrified into a reference point in discussions, debates and controversies on big topics. Kartini's name is invoked in studies of colonialism, racism, political ideologies, religion, gender, equality, human rights and women's emancipation. In specifically Indonesian contexts, her name is invoked in conversations on girls’ education and careers.

Now, this is a very heavy burden to lay on the shoulders of one who lived a mere twenty-five years and six months. The years of Kartini's life that are part of the written record are 1898–1904. Within this short time span, if we read her letters we discover passage from a young girl's excitement at venturing upon the modern age, the noble ideals and dreams of the precocious, the transport of affections for new-found friends, energetic efforts to raise pride in Javanese culture, and the hope of forming ties with like-minded young people in Java. There is also maturation, ambitions adapted to meet changed circumstances, and then a life cut short just days after giving birth to her only child. Had Kartini been given a longer life we would perhaps have traced evolution in ideas and principles and achievement of goals. Over the decades since her death, commentators have analysed Kartini according to the sensibilities of their own historical time and priorities. And they have necessarily found the heroine wanting.

In the decade before the 1911 publication of a selection of her letters unleashed a century of Kartini image-making, there was a “real” Kartini. A few Dutch men and women maintained a correspondence with her; even fewer had met her in person. And even while this “historical Kartini” was writing long private letters projecting images of herself as a “modern girl”, she was already being imagined by others in the colonial capital and abroad. Her name was beginning to circulate in contemporary media in the Netherlands and its East Indies colony to conjure up a new vision of an imperial mission.

In exploring the ways in which Kartini was variously imagined by Europeans in the few years of her adult public life, this Chapter reads back from the extant correspondence and archival record to examine the discursive contexts that first framed the now century-old image of Kartini.

It focuses on elucidating the contemporary (in Kartini's lifetime) Dutch “cultural imaginary” in terms of the ways in which, it is here argued, an awareness of Kartini was being processed, as well as the ways in which Kartini attempted to present herself.

The notion of a “cultural imaginary”, Dawson (1994) argues, is a useful way of giving recognition to the

In brief, the concept alerts us to the importance of taking account of the variety of intertwined influences and cultural institutions that need to be adduced in constructing historical explanations. Here, it suggests that any attempt to unravel the contemporary Dutch reception of “the idea of Kartini” needs to be located in recognition of the complex set of interrelated politico-cultural perceptions, practices and policies present at a particular moment in Dutch cultural, political, social and imperial history. In this, the Chapter argues, the contemporary “imagined Kartini” performed a highly pertinent function. Her “discovery” fed into a range of interrelated discourses and sensibilities that implicated new dimensions in the Netherlands’ imperialist project. For their advocates, seeking political and popular support in both metropolitan and colonial circuits of influence, Kartini provided a useful emblem.

Introduction

Every year on 21 April, Kartini's birthday, Indonesia celebrates Hari Kartini (Kartini Day). A day of civic celebration, it is marked by ceremonies, especially in schools and government institutions; and by reflections in the mass media on the state of women's social participation, challenges and achievements. This annual event has come to be focused, in often contradictory ways, on the “place of women” in modern Indonesia. Kartini's literary writings have been “mined” to give multiple and even contradictory characterizations of her voice, and hence of her historical significance.

This Chapter tracks the evolution of the trope of “Kartini” as a national heroine. “Kartini” has become a concept that organizes the idea of “Indonesian women”, a signifier that is deployed politically, and culturally, as part of a system of meaning-making. Her life and ideas have emerged as a “floating signifier” in Indonesian political, social and cultural discourse. While the term may appear to have a fixed referent in a historical personage, “Kartini” is given different meanings in different times, and is neither static nor solid. It shifts and slides in the process of making meanings that express contesting political discourses. In particular, this Chapter addresses the varying, shifting “Kartinis” associated with official and dissident gender politics in post-independence Indonesia in the following contexts: Sukarno's Old Order, Suharto's New Order, the contested space of Reformasi, and the contemporary post-Reformasi multimedia environment of jaman now (the “now” generation). In this Chapter, I use “Kartini” to refer to instances of the floating signifier, while references to the historical Kartini are unmarked (i.e. Kartini).

Knowing Different “Kartinis”

Kartini has become a historical figure because of the publication of her letters, written over four years of her short life (see Introduction to this volume). Hence we know her mainly as a literary figure.

Her bupati father allowed her to attend the local Dutch-language primary school, and this enabled her to interact in a colonial social milieu where she developed friendships with Dutch people, including many who visited her home. She corresponded with several of them, and we know her through her letters, in particular those she wrote to Rosa Abendanon-Mandri, the wife of a colonial official, and her earlier correspondence with Stella Zeehandelaar, a Dutch feminist whom she’d never met.

Introduction

In studies on Kartini, observations have been made about the ironies and contradictions presented by the liberal, modern and feminist persona in her letters. Goenawan Mohammad for instance points out how Kartini would negotiate on “what to say and what is not to be said” (2005, p. vi) in her letters to Stella Zeehandelaar, noting that while she denounced women's suffering in arranged and polygamous marriages as well as their lack of access to education, she was also remarkably reticent when it came to divulging the truth about her own polygamous family background. Despite their shared passion in gender reforms, Zeehandelaar never knew that Kartini was the daughter of a selir, a secondary wife named Ngasirah. Kartini, who readily identified herself as a member of the priyayi, had omitted the fact that the “mama” she spoke of in relation to “Madura royalty” (Kartini 2005, p. 30; Kartini 2014, p. 75) was in fact her stepmother, Raden Ayu Moerjam, also the consort wife (or padmi) to the bupati of Jepara, Kartini's father. What I find interesting here, however, is not so much Kartini's attempt to hide her polygamous family background from Zeehandelaar, but rather the way in which her pride as a member of the priyayi class comes to the fore. Kartini's silence in fact smacks of complicity that is implicitly class-related. As a member of the privileged class, Kartini—despite her resistance against native patriarchy—had little to say about the lower-class women who occupied the ideological and material fringes of her world, including the selir and peasant women (Gouda 1995; Hawkins 2007).1 As Manderson states, Kartini's “contrary portrait of women imprisoned, literally and metaphorically, seems peculiarly bound by class and region” (1983, p. 2).

This Chapter examines how Kartini's silence about the Other woman— represented by the selir and female peasant in Kartini's own lifetime, and the lower-class women in the postcolonial context—problematizes the popular narrative of her feminist progressiveness in Indonesian history. Of significance here is the manner in which Kartini's class consciousness has been maintained and reproduced by entrenched attitudes and viewpoints towards women who occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder in post-independence Indonesia.

This volume offers the first book-length study of the circulation and appropriation of Raden Ajeng Kartini (1879–1904, henceforth Kartini), a young Javanese woman whose influential writings emerged during the colonial Dutch East Indies, and who is now recognized as an iconic feminist and nationalist figure in Indonesia and, after Anne Frank, the most well-known Dutch-language author in the world. Spanning across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in both Asian and Western contexts, this volume maps and interprets how varying state, social and cultural actors and institutions have appropriated her thoughts to articulate their views on the position of women, race, class, civil rights, nationalism and other subjects in (post)colonial and global Indonesia, Europe and North America.

The world has known Kartini since the publication of a selection of her famous letters in 1911 titled Door duisternis tot licht (Through darkness into light) (Kartini 1911). Before that, she was mainly known in Dutch colonial circles, as can be glimpsed from almost one hundred newspaper articles during her lifetime and in response to her death in 1904.1 Since 1911, she has been translated into numerous languages, including Arabic, Sundanese, Javanese, Japanese, Russian and French, but most influentially into English as Letters of a Javanese Princess in 1920 (Kartini 1920) and into Indonesian as Habis gelap terbitlah terang (When darkness ends, light appears) for the first time in 1922 (Kartini 1922, 1938). Between 1911 and Indonesian independence in 1945, Indonesian and Dutch newspapers devoted thousands of articles to her and to the “Kartini schools” named after her. Since then, hundreds of books, theses and scholarly articles analysing her life and letters have been produced (Delpher). In the 1960s, she was taken up by the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, with a foreword for the English edition by Eleanor Roosevelt and by Orientalist Louis Massignon for the French edition (Kartini 1960, 1964; see also Bijl in this volume, Chapter 3). In Indonesia, President Sukarno established Kartini's birthdate, 21 April, as Kartini Day (Hari Kartini) in 1946 and made her a national hero in 1964, while under the New Order of President Suharto, Kartini Day was transformed into an annual event that is still celebrated across the archipelago (Sears 1996; Rutherford's Chapter 5 in this volume; Robinson's Chapter 6 in this volume).

Introduction

In her book on the invention of human rights in the course of the eighteenth century, Lynn Hunt offers an analysis of the type of person that is considered “human” in European modernity. She discusses the crucial relationship between autonomy, empathy and human rights by stating that “[t]o have human rights, people had to be perceived as separate individuals who were capable of exercising independent moral judgment” and as “able to empathize with others” (Hunt 2007, p. 29). However, Hunt writes, not everybody was deemed to have such a moral autonomy and deep inner life: children, slaves, servants, the propertyless, women and, we can add, colonized peoples were seen as lacking the right qualities to be deemed (fully) human. Kartini was well aware of the privileges of being identified as human. Her connections with Dutch feminists and socialists were complex, for whereas these two groups primarily fought their battles in terms of gender and class, race

was a different category altogether as it was largely unacknowledged by the international women's movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Rupp 1997). Unfazed by this extra challenge, Kartini engaged proactively with international discourses on humanity, human equality, human inequality and rights by constructing in her letters an empathetic, wilful inner life that made her part of what was at the time considered “humanity” (Bijl 2017). On 20 May 1901, she wrote to her socialist-feminist pen pal, Stella Zeehandelaar, in her characteristically ambiguous tone which hovers somewhere between admiration, irony and anger:

Hunt's emphasis on empathy, autonomy and human rights was perfectly captured by Kartini when six months later on 20 November 1901 she wrote to Mrs Abendanon-Mandri: “I learned three things from the Europeans. Love, pity, and the concept of right—I want to live according to them” (Kartini 1987, p. 98; Kartini 2014, p. 226).

Five-year-old Ananda is the youngest member of the Valley family still living in Koto. When she is not in kindergarten, she spends most of her time with her grandmother, Maryati, the oldest member of the family in the village, her single mother, and a number of other members of the family who live on their ancestral land and are her mother's cousins. Ananda, her mother and grandmother have just moved into a new house built for them by her three aunts who live in the rantau. They have all achieved some measure of success in their professions and recently bought a piece of land across the road from the family's traditional holdings that was put up for sale by another extended family in the village (see Hasanah's story in Chapter 10). In addition to providing a place for their mother and sister to live, these women wanted to maintain a stake in the village that they owned themselves. While they could, in theory, have built a house on the family's communal property across the road from where their new house is located, this would have meant negotiating with other family members and also that they would not own the property outright. The current situation means that they own the house as well as the land on which it is located and can do whatever they like with it in the future.

Other changes have taken place in Koto that mark a break with tradition. About 90 metres down the road from Ananda's house, a woman from a nearby village has opened a small, roadside stand selling coffee and light meals. The owner, her adult daughter and several grandchildren are all living on the premises which they built on a plot of land leased to them by the village family that owns the adjacent fields. While it is unclear whether such a venture can be successful in Koto, it is concerning to a number of the members of the Valley family, who are increasingly worried about people from outside the village gaining control of land and assets that rightfully belong to the extended families that originate in Koto (see the story of Marni and Marjan in Chapter 10). Nonetheless, the family has been slow to document their own land and obtain deeds to their hereditary assets as it is now possible to do within the Indonesian legal system.

THE LINGUISTIC CONTEXT IN INDONESIA

The linguistic context in Indonesia is extremely complex. Since achieving independence in 1945, Indonesia has used bahasa Indonesia (literally, “the language of Indonesia”) as its national language, a situation that was anticipated by the nationalist movement as early as the 1920s. In fact, the origin of the national language is usually dated to the Youth Pledge (Soempah Pemoeda) made by nationalist leaders in 1928 that called for a future nation of Indonesia whose language would be Indonesian (Foulcher 2000). However, despite the fact that this formalization of the language came less than 100 years ago, there had been a de facto Indonesian language in use for centuries before this time.

Modern Indonesian is a standardized form of Malay, a member of the Austronesian family of languages, that had been in use as a lingua franca in the region that now makes up the modern nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei Darussalam. In its earliest period of usage, Malay was likely a trading language used to facilitate interaction among people who spoke different languages that were also indigenous to the islands that would become Indonesia. Over time, it spread and developed and eventually came to be associated with Islam and the religious and cultural practices that were related to the religion (Adelaar and Himmelmann 2005).

Indonesia eventually became the Netherlands East Indies, first under the control of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) and later the Dutch government when the VOC collapsed in 1800, after nearly 200 years of operation. Portuguese traders and missionaries were also active in the eastern part of the region before the VOC consolidated its holdings. The British, who had colonized the Malay peninsula, held the region of Bengkulu on the island of Sumatra from 1685 to 1824. There was great interest in the area by European explorers because of the availability of a wide range of spices that had been known in Europe for centuries but that had been controlled by middlemen in the Arab world and India (Ellen 1977; Ricklefs 2008). Despite intense interaction with European powers over a period of centuries, the languages of the colonizers remained a source of loan words but never became widespread media of communication in Indonesia.

RELIGION IN THE MINANGKABAU COMMUNITY

All Minangkabau are Muslim, and identification with this religion is part of the ethnic identity of the group. For this reason, it is not possible for members of the ethnic group to profess another religion; if they do convert, for example, they effectively remove themselves from the rest of the community. There have been one or two cases of a family member of a prominent Minangkabau figure converting to Christianity which, when known to the public, immediately became a major topic of discussion among the public, and this is increasingly a topic of discussion in Minang language social media. One such case involved the half-brother of Hamka, a prominent writer and religious leader. A recent biography documents this and other aspects of the life of this half-brother, which some readers consider despicable and have linked with the recurrent issue of a missionary presence in West Sumatra. It is unclear to what extent Christian missionaries have actually approached members of the Minangkabau community in the past, but there have been several conspiracy-type accusations that circulated among the public in recent years (see, for example, Minang Lamo 2013). Anecdotal evidence suggests that conversions from Islam rarely occur. However, religion is a central element of identity perception among the Minangkabau and one whose practices frame its experience. In this, the experience of the community parallels that of several other groups in the Malay world, most notably the Malay themselves, for whom adherence to Islam is a fundamental characteristic that determines ethnic identification (Lian 2001).

For the Minangkabau, as is the case for many of Indonesia's ethnic groups, Islam represents a comparatively new influence in their history. Islam is viewed as having reached Indonesia in the eleventh century (Ricklefs 2008), likely introduced by traders and travellers from India and the Middle East. The religion gradually spread, replacing the older Hindu and Buddhist practices that were already in existence (Clarke et al. 2004). These older practices, which had long since entered the region from India, had mixed with indigenous religious beliefs that are thought to have had a strong supernatural dimension (Brakel 2004). The original religious practices of Indonesia never completely disappeared however, and it is not uncommon to see traces of them in modern society.

OLDER MINANGKABAU IN INSTITUTIONALIZED CARE

For more than thirty years, the Ministry of Social Affairs has run old age homes around Indonesia that provide room and board for older people who have no family or the means to support themselves independently. Care at one of these institutions is completely free to the residents, and provision is made for the complex health care needs many older people will develop late in life. Generally, however, an individual must be able to care for him or herself at the time of admission. These public institutions are generally referred to as Panti Sosial Tresna Werdha (PSTW). The term tresna werdha is Javanese and means “love of old people”. Panti sosial is Indonesian and refers to any type of social facility, such as a nursing home, orphanage, or other similar residential institution. In addition to these public facilities, privately run nursing homes for older people have been established by a number of hospitals and organizations. These facilities require payment, although some do accept residents who cannot pay.

In West Sumatra, the two largest old age facilities are Panti Sosial Tresna Werdha Sabai nan Aluih which is located in the town of Sicincin, not far from Padang, and Panti Sosial Tresna Werdha Kasih Sayang Ibu, in the town of Batusangkar in the highland interior of the province. The names chosen for the two facilities are interesting in that they have specific connotations that are meaningful in the context of their function. The PSTW located in Sicincin is in the traditional rantau. The name Sabai nan Aluih is a reference to a character in a well-known Minangkabau folk tale, who is portrayed as the epitome of a dutiful and loyal daughter who loves and respects her parents. The character represents the exemplary child. By contrast, the facility in Batusangkar, which is in the Minangkabau heartland, uses an Indonesian name that means “mother's love”. Both names are intended to convey the idea of affection between family members and refer to an idealized relationship between parents and children. These two facilities can accommodate 110 and 70 people respectively and account for 75 per cent of the accommodation for elderly people in need in the province. Both facilities are currently full to capacity and are approached by individuals with no place to live or families seeking accommodation for an older relative on a weekly basis.