Indonesia: Peoples and Histories - Tengku Muhammad Dhani Iqbal

PREFACE
the societies of the other islands form a fringe. Sometimes that fringe is called
the Malay-Muslim zone, again indicating Java’s difference.
For all historians there is a very real problem in how to write an Indonesian
history that covers Java and somehow fits “the rest” in. Each community is its
own center. It is possible to write a history that begins with Ternate and its water
empire, or that takes Aceh as the organizing center, includes its vassal states
on the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, and follows the process of such polities
becoming incorporated into a state based in Java. No center other than Jakarta
was proposed by Indonesians in creating their nation in 1945. No one argued
that Palembang in southeast Sumatra, site of the ancient kingdom of Srivijaya,
should be the capital of the new country of Indonesia. Nor were there any proponents
for Pasai, the first known sultanate to export Islam across the archipelago.
Java and the Javanese have seemed to Indonesians to be the core of the
nation. The Dutch city of Jakarta, heir to Muslim and Hindu pasts, was accepted
as the appropriate site for the republic’s capital.
Labels create problems in telling histories. There was no entity internationally
recognized as “Indonesia” before 1949 or even thought of before the
second and third decades of the twentieth century. The term “Indonesian” appears
straightforward, but it covers citizens whose ancestors originated in the
Indonesian archipelago, China, India, Arabia, and Europe. Political and religious
passions often reserve the term Indonesian for those whose ancestors
originated in Arabia and the archipelago. Designating an Indonesian as, for example,
“Chinese” (as I do in this text) regrettably carries the implication, and
reinforces it, that such persons are not “really” Indonesian. Some scholars use
the term Chinese Indonesian. Logically, then, we should also say Minangkabau
Indonesian, Arab Indonesian, Javanese Indonesian, and so on. Similarly,
the term “Dutch” appears straightforward, meaning a person born in
Holland. But in Indonesian histories, Dutch troops generally meant a company
composed of a score of European men and hundreds of Balinese, Javanese,
Batavians, Timorese, Buginese, and Ambonese soldiers. Nationalist,
imperial, and postcolonial histories cast colonialism as a great drama of brown
against white, but to ordinary men and women the drama was more complicated.
Dutch rule created a single political unit incorporating many sultanates. It
circulated Muslim and Christian Indonesians through colonial space along
roads, railways, and steamship routes. Dutch rule brought Indonesians into
continuous relationships with each other, where before encounters were sporadic.
The Dutch also played the role of agent for the introduction and application
of technological inventions such as the printing press, the telegraph,
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