The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

316 REVIEWS
to be cosseted than the female in a household.
that.
Kartini bas not changed
What is most striking about the letters is not how much has changed,
but how little. Kartini was amazingly clairvoyant about her own people
(as Indonesians today can be disarmingly frank about their shortcomings,
while doing nothing to overcome them), referring to them as "these
grown-up children", noting that "the most serious fault of our people is
idleness", and lamenting "the Javanese who possesses no books except
school books". She records Dutch opinions that "we Javanese are
reproached as born liars, wholly untrustworthy, and we are called
ingratitude personified." One of the advantages, she thought, of a
training in Europe over that available locally was that it would make a
great difference "to our indolent people with their exalted ideas". Even
ideal Javanese ladylike behaviour which so riled her is unchangedspeaking
"with a little whispering voice which can hardly be beard by an
ant" and laughing so as not to expose one's teeth. The arranged marriage
is still extremely common, even in the towns.
The other striking thing about the letters is the oddity of some of
the remarks.
She was so 'Dutchified' that she even found Dutch a
"beautiful, musical language", which is an unusual view, to say the least.
She thought the Koran was ''too holy to be translated into any language
whatever" and as no one spoke Arabic in Japara, no one understood. In
1902 she asked Mrs. Abendanon to ask a friend "if, among the Mohammedans,
there were laws of majority, as among you" and added "how
strange for me to ask!
It makes me ashamed that we do not know
ourselves". She found touching the simple faith of peasants who thought
her presence, and that of her sister, caused their rain-making prayers to
be answered; in this she is very much the paternalistic prijaji sure of his
or her position in a changeless, ordered society.
But these oddities are to be expected. Although exposed to
militant Dutch feminists and the like, she was certainly writing at a
period when a consciousness of the outside world was only beginning,
and she was still very young; as she says herself to Mrs. van Kol, most