Performing Power

Front matter

Performing Power

Cultural Hegemony, Identity, and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia

Arnout van der Meer z

Contents

Figures xi Acknowledgments xiii

A Note on Spelling and Terms xvii

INTRODUCTION The Performance of Power 1

Introduction

‘The Performance of Power

OLLOWING A SUCCESSFUL PERIOD working in the colonial capital

of Batavia (Jakarta), Prawiradinata, a young and ambitious clerk in the

indigenous civil service, was transferred to a new post in Purwakarta, a small town in Java’s interior. His enthusiasm about his career advancement quickly evaporated when he discovered that beyond the capital, conservative attitudes pervaded the colonial administration. In December 1912, Prawiradinata was summoned by his Dutch superior, Assistant Subdistrict Administrator A. A. C. Linck, who, in a confrontational tone, accused the clerk of not submitting his paperwork on time. Startled by the rebuke, Prawiradinata responded in Dutch rather than Javanese—a signal that he was not only Western-educated but also unwilling to offer traditional deference to his supervisor. At the time, it was still customary for Javanese subordinates to adhere to a strict colonial language hierarchy, addressing superiors in high Javanese while they in turn answered in a lower form of the language. This deviation from bureaucratic practice infuriated Linck, who bellowed that he would “not be lied to by a native.” Declaring that everyone in the civil service complained about Prawiradinata’s sluggish work ethic, Linck clearly attempted to reassert his authority over an insolent colonial subject by invoking the trope of the lazy native.' In the ensuing battle of wills, Prawiradinata persisted and vowed—still in Dutch—that he was neither lazy nor a liar. Linck dismissed Prawiradinata but immediately filed an official complaint with the local bupati, the Javanese district head. Tellingly, when Prawiradinata later appeared before the bupati, he was not questioned about the missing paperwork but rather about his alleged impolite and boorish behavior in addressing his superior.

This seemingly minor encounter illustrates the importance of the everyday staging and performance of power in colonial Indonesia and in colonial societies more broadly. The palpable anxiety surrounding Linck and Prawiradinata’s confrontation stemmed from competing assumptions about the proper social and cultural norms that structured all interactions between colonizer and colonized. The Dutch administrator expected to receive traditional Javanese deference as validation of his authority, whereas the Javanese clerk adopted Western etiquette to signify his education and modernity. Linck’s attitude and expectations of how the encounter and its aftermath would unfold reveal the manner in which colonial hegemony was communicated through language, manners, material status symbols, and even physical gestures and posture. Through this scripted performance of power, authorities sought to affirm, uphold, and strengthen colonial hierarchies of race, class, and gender, which the Dutch overlords proclaimed were natural and enduring. But as Prawiradinata’s actions show, the colonized were not merely extras in the colonial play. By the early twentieth century, reliance on these nineteenth-century tropes was starting to give way, and many Javanese began to assert their agency through subversive responses to the script. Their actions enabled them to negotiate and contest colonial hegemony, which, as Prawiradinata and Linck’s confrontation reflects, resulted in mounting tensions between proponents of tradition and modernity in colonial society.

Encounters like the one between Prawiradinata and Linck are central to this book, which focuses on the changing history of colonial hegemony and its contestation through everyday interactions in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century colonial Indonesia. Though histories of economic exploitation and political movements provide essential context for studying systems of hegemonic control, my analysis focuses on culture, the performance of power, everyday experiences, and the steady development of Indonesian agency. The study of the performance of power in colonial Indonesia reveals a new understanding of the Indonesian national awakening, one rooted not in the founding of political movements and organizations but in the proliferation of everyday discursive acts that challenged colonial hegemony and strategies of domination.

Javanization, Hegemony, and Resistance

In the seventeenth century, the lucrative spice trade drew the Dutch to the Indonesian archipelago, where they established a colonial foothold on the island of Java that lasted until Indonesian independence in 1949.” By the nineteenth century, the Dutch had created a colonial state that oversaw the production of cash crops, labor exploitation, and resource extraction through a combination of ruthless subjugation and cunning diplomacy and trade. As with many colonizing powers, rather than relying solely on the “right of conquest,” the legitimacy of Dutch authority on Java depended on preserving the traditional indigenous elite—in this case, the priyayi, a class of Javanese nobles and aristo-bureaucrats. While the institution of indirect rule in colonial Indonesia, including Dutch colonizers’ essential collaboration with the priyayi, has been the subject of excellent historiographical studies, the actual exercise of colonial power has received scant scholarly attention.” This is surprising because their collaboration required significant cultural accommodations, and the Dutch adopted Javanese deference etiquette, symbols of power, sartorial hierarchies, lifestyles, and architecture to legitimize their colonial authority. In historical scholarship, this process of acculturation is often treated as a byproduct of centuries of cultural and racial mixing due to the immigration and conjugal policies of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC).* Benedict Anderson, for example, describes the “Javanization” of the Dutch as a cultural osmosis resulting from the influences exerted by Europeans’ Asian wives or concubines.” Such an interpretation obfuscates the deliberate nature of Dutch institutions designed to maintain control over increasing numbers of colonial subjects. In this book, I employ the term “Javanization” to designate a conscious policy of cultural appropriation to legitimize colonial rule.

The Javanization of colonial power in the nineteenth century can be traced back to cultural practices and concepts of authority in the Javanese Hindu-Buddhist past. It was as part of the so-called Indianization of Southeast Asia that complex bureaucracies and increased social stratification first emerged in Java from the eighth century onward. These early precolonial states were characterized by low population-to-land ratios, weak administrative organization, and interelite rivalries. As a consequence, a powerful ruler was someone who could gather and retain the largest following, not the largest territory. To that end, rulers relied on devotional state cults inspired by Indic cosmology that emphasized their prowess and elaborate networks of patron-client relations to maintain social and political order. These vertical relationships, extending throughout social rankings from the court to the village, were expressed through appearance, etiquette, language, and status symbols.° These outward forms of social communication developed in conjunction with a traditional Javanese political philosophy that emphasized, in Anderson’s words, “the signs of Power’s concentration, not the demonstration of its exercise or use.”’ Thus, Java’s precolonial states were prime examples of what Clifford Geertz famously dubbed “theatre states,” polities where displays of power—through spectacle, ceremonies, and rituals—were essential in upholding authority. According to Geertz, “Power served pomp, not pomp power.”®

The Dutch adoption of Javanese deference rituals and symbols alongside the construction of the colonial state did not, however, result in a theatre state. On the contrary, I argue that the colonial Javanese state illustrates some of the limitations of this concept, especially for the colonial period. While appealing, the idea of a theatre state is rather static and ahistorical, and does not satisfactorily allow for change over time. By prioritizing cultural and symbolic power over domination by force, the theory disregards rulers’ need for political and economic authority to orchestrate, shape, and direct the theatrical staging of power. Similarly, chere is little room for agency, as one is left to assume that all play their assigned roles without contestation or mediation. Consequently, the framework of the theatre state does not explain historical transitions and social transformations.’ For instance, the Dutch adoption of Javanese symbols of power and etiquette during the first decades of the nineteenth century did not result in widespread acquiescence to their rule. On the contrary, coercive measures were necessary to meet the challenges of large-scale revolts, everyday avoidance protest, and messianic movements.’° These forms of resistance underscore the fact that theatre states require political and coercive power in order to be imposed and maintained.

John Pemberton similarly argues that power in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia was not simply enforced from above but was a pervasive cultural effect produced through the performance of tradition. Crucially, he shows that while the Dutch assumed Javanese culture was static and enduring, it was precisely through the colonial encounter that the Javanese elite articulated a “traditional” identity, expressed through language, dress, and etiquette, in contradistinction to the Dutch. In this way, the colonial encounter itself produced a more fixed construction of Javanese culture. The Dutch attempt to legitimize power through cultural appropriation and the crystallization of Javanese cultural identity demonstrates that power and tradition are fluid and malleable concepts.” Thus, a more expansive analysis beyond the theatre state is essential to understand the relationship between culture and power in colonial Indonesia.

The concept of cultural hegemony offers a more dynamic and historical perspective that, significantly, emphasizes agency as a key component of the interplay between culture and power. Although formulated by the Italian Marxist and activist Antonio Gramsci to explain and contest the rise of fascism in early-twentieth-century Italy, cultural hegemony offers scholars valuable insights into the relationship between culture and power in colonial societies as well. Cultural hegemony refers to the continuous process through which a dominant group—in this case, the colonizer—tries to attain and maintain the consent of the great majority of the people it rules—here, the colonized. This was accomplished through the manipulation of cultural values, norms, beliefs, and traditions in an attempt to validate the ruling group’s worldview and make it appear favorable to all. In this way, the hegemonic discourse of the ruling group rationalized the social, racial, political, and economic inequalities of colonial society and sought to inculcate a sense that those inequalities were enduring and inevitable. In theory, a successful ruling group could rely less on domination by force and the coercive apparatus of the state and more on the majority of the population’s passive resignation. But hegemony is never static or absolute. It is inherently contested, thus enabling subordinate groups to negotiate and sometimes defy the terms of hegemonic discourse. Managing such negotiations and counterhegemonic challenges requires that the dominant group constantly renew and adjust its approach. In other words, hegemony involves continual cultural struggle, as ruling groups seek to legitimize their authority while inevitably leaving openings for subordinate groups to contest it.'*

Cultural hegemony thus offers an insightful approach to the study of Dutch dominance in Indonesia and its contestation at the subaltern level. This is especially apt given the importance and pervasiveness of ritual display and highly refined rules for social interaction in Javanese society, particularly in political intercourse. Although there are numerous studies on the ways in which cultural hegemony has been applied to the colonial context in South Asia in particular, the concept is conspicuously absent from studies on colonial Indonesia." In part this can be explained by the association of colonialism with violence and oppression, which is reflected in numerous studies on moments of upheaval, revolt, and organized political movements. As Jan Breman has shown, this has too often resulted in the problematic assumption that between moments of outright confrontation, the endemic oppression and exploitation of colonialism were passively endured in everyday life. This is where the explanatory value of cultural hegemony lies; maintaining hegemony requires a balance of coercion and consent, with domination by force at one end of the spectrum and consensus and negotiation at the other.” Although cultural hegemony was never fully attained in the colonial context—Ranajit Guha fittingly described colonial rule as “dominance without hegemony”—the concept enables historians to explore the myriad ways in which power was continuously communicated and contested in colonial systems of dominance."* This approach also illuminates why, when, and how colonial power could be made to seem natural and legitimate rather than alien and oppressive.

As historical methodology, cultural hegemony offers a way to understand how the Dutch, and colonizers in general, were able to impose an exploitative socioeconomic and repressive political order that most officials could justify as a civilizing enterprise. Their alliances with, and ability to incorporate the interests of, indigenous elites and bureaucrats were an essential prerequisite to sustained control.” The Dutch partnership with the priyayi, for instance, was based on a notion of parallel elites: Dutch officials and Javanese priyayi were supposedly equal in administering their own constituencies. In return for their allegiance to the Dutch, the priyayi were rewarded with hereditary rights, economic incentives, and the retention of their pomp and ceremony.” In a similar vein, the Dutch granted far-reaching economic, legal, and political privileges to Chinese merchants, shopkeepers, and moneylenders, who were indispensable as middlemen in the colonial economy.” And last but not least, indigenous mercenary soldiers filled the ranks of the colonial army, which was essential to the coercive apparatus of the state.”

Because a large majority of the population consisted of illiterate peasants, conveying hegemonic ideas and ideology posed a significant challenge for Dutch colonizers. Their strategies made it imperative that my research move beyond the realm of official reports, legal proceedings, ordinances, popular periodicals, and other written forms of communication that scholars deploying Gramsci’s approach to cultural hegemony generally analyze. Thus, in addition to these standard textual sources, I emphasize the ways in which the hegemonic discourse was communicated through a complex array of social performances and material culture. In what I will refer to throughout this book as the performance of power, the Dutch announced their hegemonic discourse through etiquette, material symbols, language, clothing, architecture, urban planning, and lifestyle. These sociocultural practices created an experiential reality in which colonizers and colonized actively performed power and status during everyday encounters. These encounters took place within the civil service, on plantations, in the streets, and in households, trains, stores, and offices.” It was through these prescribed interactions that the Dutch and their Javanese allies sought to normalize colonial hierarchies and instill a sense of compliance throughout the colonized populace. When effective, these modes of imposing hegemony bolstered acceptance of foreign domination through the manipulation of indigenous culture and rendered it more difficult— but not impossible—to reject or resist the colonizers’ demands. The deliberate Javanization of colonial authority is the topic of the first chapter.

The performance of colonial power was, however, like hegemony itself, not a one-way imposition of public and social behavior but an interactive encounter between colonizer and colonized. Although performance was instrumental in expressing the hegemonic discourse, a degree of defiance was always possible. Focusing on this tension, James Scott describes interactions between colonizer and colonized as reflecting a public transcript—the hegemonic discourse. He cautions against overestimating the acquiescence of the colonized and argues that they critiqued the colonial relationship offstage, a practice he characterizes as fashioning hidden transcripts.” According to Scott, it is through these hidden transcripts that we can explore the everyday struggles of subordinate groups. In this book, however, I focus on encounters and instances in which this everyday resistance manifests onstage, in the face of power. Acts of symbolic defiance took various forms, from feigned ignorance to outright insubordination, such as Prawiradinata’s refusal to offer traditional deference to his superior. This approach draws attention to Indonesian agency in everyday colonial encounters, as opposed to limiting active resistance to direct political opposition or rebellion. By tracing the development and evolution of the performance of power, a dynamic and engaging history emerges that reveals the modes and sites of Indonesian defiance as well as the ways in which the Dutch continually worked to legitimize their authority.

The primary geographic focus of this book lies on Java (see figure 1), but the histories it explores more broadly illustrate how the performance of power shaped emergent Indonesian cultural narratives and identities. After establishing Batavia in 1619 (present-day Jakarta), the island of Java was at the center of the Dutch colonial project in Asia. Following the bankruptcy of the VOC at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Dutch transformed the trade empire’s dispersed possessions into a Java-centered colonial state known as the Netherlands Indies. Through a series of brutal wars—such as the infamous Aceh War (1873-1904)—and diplomatic coercion, the vast Indonesian archipelago was effectively consolidated under Dutch control by the twentieth century. Java remained the administrative, political, and economic bedrock of this modern colonial state, and the island’s major cities became meeting grounds where people from throughout the archipelago discovered, discussed, and contested their shared colonial subjecthood. Java was home to the majority of Western-style schools, institutions of higher education, political and cultural associations, and vernacular newspapers and periodicals. As Robert Elson asserts, “the cities of Java were the fulcrum of intellectual life” where the “idea of Indonesia” was not only embraced but also began to flourish during the final decades of colonial rule.” Analyzing the performance of power in these locations, this book offers an original perspective on the transition from a Javanese identity to an Indonesian one.

Tracing how Indonesians viewed and experienced this cultural hegemonic struggle is quite a challenge for historians. The task is complicated by the nature of the colonial archives, which reflect and confirm the Dutch colonizer’s hegemonic worldview. There are limited sources that shed light on the Indonesian

FIGURE I. Java, ca. 1900-1942 perspective in the nineteenth century, in particular.” It is possible to read the archival record against the grain and decipher modes of hegemonic protest in the form of foot-dragging, flight, vandalism, and millenarianism.” There is also linguistic evidence of such everyday resistance, eternalized, for instance, in the nineteenth-century Dutch proverb that someone is “East Indian deaf,” referring to situations in which a person pretends not to hear a question or a command. Rooted in the colonial trope of the lazy native, the saying is associated with indolence to this day but also with colonial officials who were indifferent to the concerns of the colonized.** However, from the late nineteenth century onward, the Indonesian experience comes more sharply into focus through the increasing availability of sources penned by the colonized themselves, such as vernacular newspapers and periodicals, pamphlets, correspondence, novels, and biographies. By drawing extensively on these sources, I reconstruct and analyze the interactive hegemonic struggle between colonizer and colonized.

The private correspondence of Indonesian national heroine Raden Adjeng Kartini, an early advocate for women’s rights and education, offers an instructive example of how Indonesians perceived the colonial performance of power. In a letter to a Dutch friend, Stella Zeehandelaar, in January 1900, Kartini wrote that she detested offering traditional Javanese deference to Europeans. She confided that she could not suppress a smile and had to bite her lips to prevent herself from laughing outright at the manner in which Dutch officials emphasized their prestige over the Javanese. Obviously, Kartini did not buy into the “ridiculous spectacle” that Dutch colonizers maintained was crucial to legitimizing their authority to the Javanese population. She even went so far as to call Dutch prestige “imaginary,” in essence undermining the cultural grounds on which colonial rule was constructed. Significantly, Kartini also suggested that she was not alone in her views. For instance, she described how humble crowds respectfully retreated before an assistant resident under the shade of his gilded payung—a Javanese ceremonial parasol— only to burst out laughing once he turned his back.” Although Kartini’s letters do not constitute evidence of direct hegemonic contestation, they do shed light on the Indonesian mentality in the colonial encounter. Due to her privileged position as a woman of noble birth, Kartini was able to critique the Dutch as long as her views did not spread too widely throughout the population—yet. Although Kartini was ahead of her time, her letters indicate that the times were changing. Only a few years later, the colonized would increasingly declare and perform such private sentiments of resistance directly to Dutch officials.

The turn of the twentieth century was a tumultuous period of social and cultural change in colonial Indonesia and the world more broadly.” Characterized by rapid technological innovation, demographic growth, and urbanization, the era saw the increased mobility of people, goods, and ideas. The nature of colonialism itself was also changing, due to the social application of evolutionary science as well as the privatization of the colonial economy and its incorporation into global trade networks. In addition, the rise of imperial Japan and the American colonization of the Philippines shifted the regional balance of power and created a growing self-awareness among the colonized.” Under these circumstances, it became increasingly difficult to legitimize the Dutch colonial project through the Javanization of power. The inevitable adjustment to these transformations occurred in 1901 with the proclamation of the Ethical Policy. The Dutch equivalent of the civilizing mission, the Ethical Policy was based on the premise that Dutch superiority, rooted in scientific and technological prowess, created a moral obligation to “civilize” the supposedly backward colonized peoples. The new policy resulted in educational, agricultural, and administrative reforms—all topics of previous historical inquiry—and, crucially, in a new hegemonic script for the performance of colonial power.” As representatives of European civilization and modernity, the Dutch could no longer rely on cultural accommodation without losing their credibility. Colonial officials and civil servants were thus instructed to replace Javanese deference traditions with modern Western etiquette. These instructions set the tone for a comprehensive overhaul of the appearance of colonial power reflected in language, social norms, architecture, public spaces, and consumer culture.

Io Introduction

The implementation of this ethical discourse was far from straightforward, however. Like all civilizing ideologies, the Ethical Policy was based on a contradictory premise. While the Dutch publicly proclaimed a moral responsibility to civilize the indigenous population, Social Darwinist beliefs about racial difference suggested that the colonized could never be civilized; that is, could never match the colonizer’s level of evolutionary development.” Predictably, the Ethical Policy divided colonial officials, administrators, and civil servants with regards to its feasibility and desirability. Policymakers and officials in the colonial government sought to employ Dutch tutelage and Western examples to advance Java and its inhabitants toward limited political participation. However, the majority of Dutch colonial civil servants maintained that due to intrinsic differences between colonizer and colonized, it would be more effective to uphold Javanese traditions as the basis of colonial rule. In their opposition to the Ethical Policy, Dutch civil servants found support among conservative members of the priyayi, who similarly feared a loss of power and prestige with the implementation of “ethical” protocol. I explore this discrepancy between emancipatory theory and conservative practice in the performance of colonial power in chapter 2.

1913: From Everyday Resistance to National Awakening

Where colonial authorities were unable to bridge the gap between discursive theory and practice during the first decade of the twentieth century, an emerging generation of Indonesians succeeded in 1913. As civil servants like Assistant Resident Linck continued to insist on receiving Javanese deference, young Indonesians like Prawiradinata grew more outspoken, self-confident, and vocal. It was this modern, educated generation that eventually demanded equality and respect by disturbing the colonial performance. In April 1914, the official newspaper of the Sarekat Islam, Indonesia’s first political movement, published an article titled “Freedom” (kemerdekaan). Contrary to what the modern reader might expect, the author did not refer to a desire for political or national independence but rather to the struggle for freedom from the oppressive, humiliating, and belittling attitude of Dutch officials within colonial society. The article described how in previous months, many young Indonesians changed their attitudes and behaviors in the colonial encounter by refusing to cower for the colonizer, demanding to sit on chairs instead of on the floor, withholding traditional gestures of respect, ignoring the Javanese language hierarchy, and addressing officials by their position rather than by an undeserving aristocratic

Introduction Il title. Through these disturbances of the colonial performance, the author argued, the colonized could force colonial officials to treat them with more respect and dignity and finally live up to their so-called ethical promises. He therefore implored readers to follow this example. This article was not the only call to action. From mid-1913 onward, the vernacular press was filled with articles that describe how, through acts of defiance in the face of power, a new generation of Indonesians subverted Dutch expectations and demanded to be treated as human beings and as equals. Their actions drastically altered the performance of power in the everyday colonial encounter.

The sudden proliferation in 1913 of everyday discursive challenges to the colonial performance of power signaled a broad social transformation and change in mentality that has been largely overlooked in the scholarly literature. Historians of the Indonesian national awakening have primarily focused on explicit political defiance and protest—such as associations, political parties, rallies, unions, strikes, and a critical press—as indicators and drivers of broad social change. This preoccupation with political resistance obscures everyday forms of resistance that were not overtly political, ideological, or organized, and yet sought to negotiate and alleviate colonial inequalities. I suggest that instead of focusing on political events as hinges of historical change, everyday discursive acts—changes in language, attitude, and appearance—reveal a more pervasive moment of social transformation.

Evidence of everyday forms of resistance is hard to find in the archives, which reflect colonial authorities’ fixation on political resistance. However, by critically examining a series of Dutch circulars that prescribed the etiquette of the colonial encounter—specifically, those addressing attire and hormat (customary ways of showing respect)—I am able to trace the growth and pervasiveness of everyday discursive acts in the early twentieth century. This history challenges the prevailing notion that this was an era of relative “peace and order” (to use a deceptive colonial catchphrase) without much anticolonial resistance. It also suggests that a broader and more conscious challenge to the colonial order of things grew out of these everyday struggles. This book therefore offers an important revision to the prevailing narrative of the Indonesian national awakening, demonstrating that it was not just a movement that a small political elite incited from the top-down but also one that grew out of a large social transformation from below.

As I have argued with Bart Luttikhuis, the manifestation of everyday resistance and demands for equality indicate a broad change in mentality in 1913 that constitute a turning point in Indonesian history.” These events are best understood as the outcome of long-term developments that converged in 1913 to decisively move Indonesian society in a new direction. My focus on everyday forms of resistance as indicators of social change complements and contextualizes more familiar benchmarks in colonial Indonesian history. Many have been the subject of previous studies, such as the impact of the Ethical Policy, the growing availability of Western education, and young Indonesians’ subsequent embrace of modernity, specifically science, technology, and consumerism.** In addition, Indonesians increasingly displayed a new global consciousness inspired by the rise of Japan as an imperial power, the British Indian nationalist movement, Chinese nationalists’ victory in 1911, and the international Islamic modernist movement, originating in Egypt.” In part encouraged by these crusades, this new political consciousness was reflected in the creation of Indonesia’s first cultural, religious, and political organizations, foremost among them Boedi Oetomo and Sarekat Islam, founded in 1908 and 1911, respectively.” Finally, there was the development of a critical vernacular press in which Indonesians expressed themselves and debated their place in the world.” On their own, these events did not amount to instantaneous and broad social change, but their fortuitous culmination in 1913 created the circumstances under which Indonesians began to actively demand respect and dignity by challenging the colonial performance.

Chapter 3 examines this moment in 1913, detailing the ways in which a generation of assertive, educated, professionally employed, and well-informed young Indonesians contested Dutch colonial hegemony. It demonstrates how minor confrontations over appropriate etiquette quickly ballooned into more pervasive social activism. Of pivotal importance to this history is the release of a hormat circular in August 1913, a government decree prohibiting colonial officials from demanding traditional deference from the colonized.” The circular was written in response to the escalation of a conflict between a Javanese public prosecutor who refused to sit on the floor and wear traditional Javanese clothing and his European superior who insisted on submissive behavior from a colonial subject. What set this particular confrontation apart was both actors’ persistence in their respective performances of power, which eventually brought the incident to the attention of high colonial officials in Batavia. Fearing that civil servants’ lofty attitudes alienated young Indonesians and undermined colonial peace and order, the government issued the hormat circular to forcibly align its performance of authority with the ethical discourse it espoused. This was a remarkable piece of colonial legislation, as it recognized that traditional deference rituals were humiliating for the colonized, publicly condemned the attitude of colonial civil servants, and pledged betterment on the part of the colonizer. The circular also led the colonial government to increasingly support the nascent nationalist movement. This seemingly contradictory consequence illustrates that times were indeed changing.”

The hormat circular of 1913 played an important but often overlooked role in energizing the Indonesian nationalist movement. The vernacular press widely and publicly reviewed the implications of the circular, and the Sarekat Islam, with the colonial government’s support, publicized and interpreted it at rallies and meetings. These discussions instilled in the colonized an increased sense of confidence and justice that encouraged them to perform truth to power by refusing to submit to traditional deference customs. Decisions about how to present oneself became empowering acts of hegemonic contestation. In response to these challenges, conservative colonial officials as well as Javanese aristocrats condemned young Indonesians and Dutch supporters of ethical ideals, accusing the progressive coalition of destabilizing colonial society and destroying indigenous culture. This resulted in a fierce public debate over the nature and form of the colonial encounter. Although the reactionary conservatives regained control over the government in the 1920s, Pandora’s box had been opened. It proved impossible to reimpose nineteenth-century colonial hegemony, as discussions about what constituted proper etiquette expanded into larger conversations about Indonesian culture and identity.

The social transformations of 1913 were reinforced by a deliberate change in attire. Chapter 4 takes a closer look at this particular aspect of indigenous demands for equality and respect, demonstrating that clothes were an important instrument and site of hegemonic contestation. The timing of what effectively constituted a sartorial revolution was certainly no coincidence. Beginning in September 1913, in the wake of the hormat circular, many young Indonesian professionals, such as teachers, clerks, and railroad personnel, suddenly and swiftly replaced their traditional sarong and headscarf with trousers, a jacket, and tie. By donning Western attire, Indonesians visually expressed that they considered themselves modern and equal to Europeans. In the process, they asserted that they would no longer cower and humiliate themselves in front of colonial officials. While this was not a political revolution, the sartorial transformation was an unmistakable statement directed toward both European colonizers and the conservative Javanese priyayi. The new generation’s abrupt change in clothes reverberated throughout colonial society, visually signifying the dawn of a new era in the colonial encounter.