Among the Believers

by V. S. Naipaul

  He was impressed by the journey he had made, and it was an immense journey. In one generation he had fitted in the experience that for other Indonesians had unfolded over the last four or five centuries. And yet he hadn’t been able to write his autobiography. He had made two attempts in the last three years and had discarded hundreds of pages. The material was too rich, too extraordinary; the changing personality of the writer, to him the essence of his experience, was something he hadn’t been able to express; he had only been able to record events.

  He said, of what he had written, “There is no synthesis in the whole. It has not become an expression of growth through the prism of me as an individual. All that I’ve experienced doesn’t fall into a context, artistically, personally, politically.”

  He hadn’t been able to define himself because he didn’t know who he was. He had been cut off from his past. He had gone to the Dutch school when he was six; he had been cleansed of village beliefs. For a writer, his early life had been oddly wordless: he had never had a conversation with his parents. That was why the Canadian anthropologist had been of such use to him.

  She had spent five months in his village, and he had gone with her as a guide and interpreter. He showed a photograph of the anthropologist, a big and lovely young woman in a safari suit: clearly, being a Batak and Sitor had its compensations. By her skilled questioning she had reconstructed his ancestral past for him. He couldn’t have done it himself. So now, when he tried to write the autobiography again, he would at least be able to say, “This was how my ancestors lived for eighteen generations.”

  Sitor said, “I am complicated. But not confused.”

  Throughout the morning various people had dropped in. One man, a German who spoke English, had come to look at the house. The other callers were for Sitor, the poet. He cherished them all. After four years of freedom it still pleased him to be sought out.

  At midday Barbara came back. She looked after her birds, one by one. Sitor and I went to the pavilion. The pavilion, at the end of a long garden at the side of the main house, was decorated with the crafts Barbara had come out to Indonesia to serve: reed mats, rattan chairs, baskets from Timor. Barbara knew her subject; she had a good, chaste eye.

  The servants (Barbara and Sitor had two) had prepared a lunch of fried fish and rice, with pickled cucumbers afterwards. Sitor, with his diabetes, ate very little.

  I asked Barbara, “Are you going back to Europe soon?”

  “I hope not.” She bit decisively on a piece of pickled cucumber.

  Sitor said, “I would like to go again. I would like to be invited for a long time. There are too many things here that hurt me.”

  Barbara’s lunch hour was quickly over; she went back to her handicrafts. I had another slice of fried fish; Sitor watched me eat. On one wall of the small room was a surrealist painting of two nudes seen from the back, one male and brown, one female and dark-red, with birds everywhere. A painter friend had called on a day when one of Barbara’s birds had died; the picture was the gift he had been moved to make. Elsewhere were violent pen drawings of nudes that Sitor himself had done.

  The glamour of Indonesia and Sitor, the poet, for Barbara; for Sitor, the glamour and security of Barbara and Europe. Barbara could take Europe for granted. Sitor, at the end of his own journey, couldn’t. He now possessed his ancestral village, the valleys, the lake, the stone walls, the fairy-tale houses. But he could no longer go back there; he couldn’t pretend to be what he had ceased to be. Without Europe (and that mean Holland) and its cultural invitations, its interest in his “complication,” he had only Indonesia, for him a land of hurt and failure, where he could get no job now, and where he could be snuffed out, without anyone or anything to appeal to.

  And it was not until many hours later that I saw what had been left out of our long talk: the twenty years from 1945 to 1965. I hadn’t asked Sitor about them: his beginnings and his present had interested me more. In those twenty years, the first of Indonesian independence, Sitor had written his poems and become famous. He had later become a politician and a man of power. To some people then, especially those who towards the end of the Sukarno time could be described as “counterrevolutionaries,” he had become a figure of threat. And, as I discovered later, there were people who felt that their careers had been damaged by Sitor. Some, even after all this time, had not forgiven him.

  But the man who told me this said almost at once, “I will not talk against him, though. He has suffered more than any of us.”

  3

  Deschooling

  Adi Sasono, whom I met at Sitor’s the first evening, told me I would understand Indonesian Muslims better if I went out to the countryside and had a look at the traditional Islamic village schools. These schools were known as pesantrens. Adi had a business associate who took an especial interest in pesantrens; and it was this man, as devout or concerned a Muslim as Adi, who planned my journey. He thought I should see a modern pesantren—there was a famous one near Yogyakarta and Borobudur; and I should also have a look at a very old one—there was one near Surabaya.

  These village pesantrens preserved the harmony between community and school, village life and education. In this they were different from the Western-style schools, which, set down in the Asian countryside, were psychologically disruptive. Adi’s friend told me that the famous educationist Ivan Illich had come to Indonesia to look at pesantrens. I hadn’t read Ivan Illich’s books, and of his theory of “de-schooling” I really knew only the word. But I knew that he had a high reputation, and I thought that it would be interesting to go where (to my surprise, I must confess) he had gone.

  I went with Prasojo, a nineteen-year-old college student, and I could not have had a better companion. Prasojo had been to Arizona for a year on a scholarship given by the American Field Service. He spoke English well, with an American accent. He had greatly enjoyed his time in Arizona, had learned much, and remained so grateful to the American Field Service that he intended to give them part of the fee he was going to get from me.

  I also felt that Prasojo wanted to give back to me, a stranger, some of the kindness he had received in the United States. For our trip he wore jeans with the AFS label stitched on the hip pocket. He was just above medium height and of Chinese appearance. That appearance was the subject of a family joke. Prasojo’s father, a bulky man, undeniably Indonesian, would say, “But, eh—how did I get this Chinese son?”

  We took the Garuda air shuttle to Surabaya, on the northern coast of East Java. Mud tainted the coastline. The rivers were muddy wriggles in the green, overworked, overpopulated land. The land around Surabaya was a land of rice, the rice fields in long thin strips, easier that way to irrigate, but suggesting from the air an immense petty diligence.

  The houses—as we saw later, driving inland from Surabaya—matched the rice strips. They were very narrow and went back a long way. The houses stood a little distance from the road, and the front yards were scraped clean, but shady. Banana trees grew out of the bare earth, and coconut trees, mango trees, sugar cane, and frangipani. The rice fields began directly at the back of the houses. During that drive we seemed to be going through one long village: Java here an unending smallness, hard to associate with famous old kingdoms and empires, a land that seemed only to be a land of people of petty diligence, the wong chilik, the little people, cursed by their own fertility, four million in Java at the beginning of the last century, eighty million today.

  It was Prasojo who gave me that word, wong chilik, telling me at the same time that the word (though beautifully appropriate in sound) was both insulting and old-fashioned. It still mattered to some people, though, who were not of the peasantry, to have their distinction acknowledged. Such people called themselves “nobles,” raden, and used the letter R. before their names. They also built houses with a special hat-shaped roof, a distinction I would have missed if Prasojo had not pointed it out to me, so squashed and repetitive and cozy it had all seemed: the red tile roofs, the walls of
woven bamboo for the poor, concrete for the not-so-poor, the yards full of shade and fruit and flowers.

  Windows were an innovation, Prasojo said. In the traditional Javanese house there were none; and, with walls of woven bamboo that shut out glare and heat but permitted ventilation, windows were not necessary. In the traditional house, light came through gaps in the roof. But concrete walls required windows; and I could see that glass louvres were fashionable among the not-so-poor.

  Each little yard had its gateposts but no gate. The posts were of a curious design, with slabbed or stepped pyramids or diamond shapes at the top, the pyramids or diamonds sometimes bisected: concrete, but concrete clearly imitating brick. These posts, which at first suggested a single ownership of land and people, perhaps by some vast plantation, were in fact the remnant of the architectural style of the last Hindu kingdom of Java, the kingdom of Majapahit, which disintegrated at the end of the fifteenth century.

  This was how the pre-Islamic past survived: as tradition, as mystery. Indrapura, “Indra’s City,” was painted on the bus in front of us; and Indra Vijaya, “The Victory of Indra,” was on many shops. But this Indra was no longer the Aryan god of the Hindu pantheon. To Prasojo, as well as to the driver of our car, this Indra was only a figure from the Javanese puppet drama. Prasojo began telling me a local Muslim legend of the five Pandava brothers, who represented the five principles of Islam. And I don’t believe Prasojo had an idea of the true wonder of the legend: the story he was telling me came from the ancient Hindu epic of the Mahabharata, which had lived in Java for fourteen hundred years, had taken Javanese roots, and had then been adapted to Islam. Prasojo, a Javanese and a Muslim, lived with beautiful mysteries. Scholarship, applied to his past, would have undermined what had become his faith, his staff.

  And so we came in the late afternoon to the town of Jombang. It was where the famous old pesantren was. But Jombang, once we turned off the highway, seemed to be full of schools. There were scattered groups of chattering Muslim schoolgirls on the road at the end of the school day: little nunlike figures, with covered heads, blouses, sarongs. Where was our pesantren, and in what way was it different from these other academies? We raced back and forth, the driver behaving as though he was still on the highway; we penetrated murky rural alleys. And then we found out that we had passed it many times: it was so ordinary-looking, even with a signboard, and not at all the sylvan retreat, the mixture of village and school, that I (and Prasojo as well) had been expecting.

  There was a fence. And behind the fence, rough two-storey concrete buildings were set about a sandy yard, which had a few trees. In the centre of the yard there was an open pillared mosque with a tiled floor just above the ground. Boys in shirts and sarongs were sitting or lounging at the edge of the floor and on the step, following an Arabic text while a sharp-voiced teacher, unseen, steadily recited.

  We went past the newspaper board—in the open, with a wooden coping, and with the newspapers behind glass—to the office at the side of the mosque. There was nobody in the office. Variously coloured shirts and sarongs hung on the verandah rails of the two-storey buildings. There were boys everywhere, barebacked, in sarongs, with warm brown skins and the lean, flat, beautiful Indonesian physique, pectoral and abdominal muscles delicately defined.

  They stared back. And then, gradually, they began to gather around Prasojo and me. When we walked, they followed. They became a crowd as we walked about the narrow dirt lanes and the muddy gutters between the houses at the back of the compound: hanging clothes or sarong-lengths everywhere, glimpses of choked little rooms (eight boys to a room, somebody told Prasojo). There was mud and rubbish outside the rough kitchen shed and the school shop; and over an open fire in the muddy yard one little saronged boy was scraping at a gluey mess of rice in a burnt saucepan. He looked up in terror, at us, at the crowd with us. Perhaps, I thought, all medieval centres of learning had been like this.

  But—was it “Illich” that one boy shouted, and then another boy?

  A very small man in a black cap, a man perhaps about four feet ten, came up to us and led us back, with our following, to the front of the compound, to a building near the mosque. He opened a door, let Prasojo and me into a big room, and shut the door on the crowd. He looked quite stern below his black cap.

  Prasojo said, “He says we are creating a disturbance.”

  I said, “It isn’t me that’s creating the disturbance.”

  Chairs were lined up in two rows on either side of low tables in this big room. We sat down.

  And just as in East Africa, at certain seasons, the flying ants pile up in drifts against the windows to which they are attracted by the light, so the students of the famous pesantren of Jombang—attracted by what? by the visitor who proved their own fame?—piled up against the windows, Mongoloid face upon Mongoloid face, grin upon grin. They mimicked every word I spoke, even in the shelter of the room. And distinctly now, between the chatter and the mimicking, there were shouts of “Illich! Illich!” Had the visit—or the reported interest—of that famous man made them so vain?

  Another man came into the room.

  Prasojo said, “They say we must be registered. There is an Arabic class going on in the mosque and we are creating a disturbance. They get lots of visitors here.”

  Of course.

  “We have to register in the office,” Prasojo said.

  “But there is no one in the office. We went there first.”

  So we sat for a while. And then it turned out that the man in the black cap had no authority at all, wasn’t even a teacher, was only a student, had been one for nine years. He had brought us to this room only to have us to himself. I thought he should be made to do something useful.

  I said to Prasojo, “Give him the letter of introduction. Tell him to take it to his leader.”

  A pesantren, being traditional and “unstructured,” as I had heard in Jakarta, didn’t have a “principal.” It had a kiyai, a “leader.”

  Meekly, the man in the black cap took the letter and went away.

  I said to Prasojo, “Couldn’t you go and talk to the Arabic teacher?”

  That class was continuing. The teacher, hidden somewhere in the shadows of the mosque, was reciting on and on.

  Prasojo was horrified. He couldn’t interrupt a teacher.

  “What do we do?”

  “We wait.”

  We waited. When the Arabic class was over we went outside, risking the crowd. Barebacked boys were lounging about the verandahs of the houses; some were smoking Indonesian clove cigarettes, sweetly scented. But the mimicking crowd, pressing all around now, made movement and speech difficult. The little man in the black cap came back, as brisk and neat and equable as ever, with the letter of introduction still in his hand. He hadn’t found his leader.

  Prasojo led me back to the room with the chairs. He said, and his unhappiness gave him a strange formality, “May I leave you here for a while? I will go and find someone.”

  He went out. I saw that none of the boys followed him. But they continued to gape at me. The evening was coming on, though, prayer time, food time, and interest in me began to abate. Less and less frequently, and sometimes now from far off (an idler moving away, his curiosity sated), came the shout of “Illich!” And Indonesian courtesy wasn’t dead. I was sitting alone, but someone from an inner room brought out many glasses of tea (as though a proper tea party was about to begin), set one glass in front of me without staring, and went away.

  Prasojo came back with two men. One was a student, who stared and remained mute. The other was an English teacher, as small as the man in the black cap. He was all smiles, anxious to practise his English. Prasojo damped him down. They talked together in Indonesian and Prasojo said the English teacher would take us to another pesantren, half an hour’s drive away, where we might see someone who might tell us something.

  There seemed little to lose. So we drove through the dusk, past the eternal Javanese village, and the smiling English teache
r, sitting next to the driver, was no trouble at all. Abruptly, after some minutes, he turned around and said, “How many times have you visited this place?” And having framed and asked his English question, and having got a reply, he sat good and quiet for the rest of the drive.

  The pesantren we came to looked newer and more businesslike: a well-constructed set of buildings of concrete and corrugated iron around a well-kept yard. It was the hour of the evening prayer: someone was chanting the call. The deputy leader was in the unlit office, an old man with thick-lensed glasses and a long blue sarong. He said we were lucky: Mr. Wahid was going the very next day to Jakarta. And he led us in the dark through some gardens to a private house, to meet Mr. Abdur Rahman Wahid, who knew all about pesantrens. And it was only then that I remembered that Mr. Wahid’s name had been given me as a man I should try to see. There had been articles about him in the Jakarta papers. His pesantren work had begun to make him a figure.

  Accident—Prasojo meeting the English teacher—had brought me to Mr. Wahid. And what Mr. Wahid—a short, chunky, middle-aged man in a sarong—said in his Western-style drawing-room—a dim ceiling light, a television set going in a far corner, women coming and going, family, servants, cups of tea laid out on the low table-what Mr. Wahid said altered the day for me, gave order to the confused experiences of the late afternoon, and opened my mind to a historical wonder.

  First, the name. In Indonesian the word for the Chinese quarter of a town was perchinen: per-china-en, “where the Chinese were.” So, pesantren was per-santri-en, “the place where the wise men were,” santri being a version of shastri, the Sanskrit word for a man learned in the Hindu shastra s, the scriptures.