In The Footsteps of Stamford Raffles

by Nigel Barley

  … His mild, conciliating, and unassuming manners, obtained for him the respect and confidence of the Dutch, whilst the natives, who had been led to form the highest possible opinion of his character, looked with anxious hope for that amelioration in their condition which they afterwards experienced, and which will make his memory adored on the island of Java for ages to come.’

  – T. Travers, Journal

  * * *

  The National Palace of Bogor is a large, white, somewhat homespun classical building. Raffles tinkered with it to suit his own solid tastes, adding an upper storey. In prints of the period it looks topheavy and ungainly. After his time, the Dutch rebuilt it. There was a fire, further revision. Then, Sukarno, erstwhile architect, made another attempt on its virtue. It ended up looking confused.

  It stands now in a large, well-ordered park ruminant with deer and statuary. Next door is the Kebun Raya, the Great Garden that is the home of botany in Java.

  Raffles installed himself here with a small staff, his wife, his books and ruled as a benevolent autocrat, a country squire running his colony as a large estate, always the style that suited Raffles best. He could seldom get away from the idea that the whole of Java was just a bigger version of his own garden. Just as, years after he moved against slavery, slaves were still labouring in the plantations, so he had been unable to free the men who worked in the grounds of his own house. The Dutch, of course, would later see this as the ultimate proof of his sinister hypocrisy.

  His authority gave him powers to overrule the other members of the Council, powers he would shortly need in order to push through his own vision of Java. Yet Raffles always naively expected to be loved for the goodness of his intentions.

  It is recorded that he required three scribes to keep up with his own output of government work at Bogor. Sometimes he even dictated to two while writing a third letter himself, yet he never forgot his scholastic mission:

  ‘My present situation, and our new conquest, afford such a wide and unparalleled field for research, that I should be worse than a Goth or Vandal if I allowed it to remain untried even in the literary way.’

  * * *

  The ideal of the philosopher-king, though unknown in the East, is one of the most tenacious ideas of the West.

  ‘It was the kind of life lived by Raffles and Olivia at Buitenzorg that probably did more than anything else to set a standard of dignity and decency for social relations in Java. In that charming and well-ordered house, there was no place for vulgar ostentation, bad manners or slovenly dress. Not that life was at all formal. If Raffles on official occasions could act as every inch a Governor, at home at Buitenzorg he was the perfect host, ready, with his own charming manners, to put everyone at his ease, to discuss affairs of state with one and fine points of language or science with another, or to play cards or promote theatricals, if that was the general desire. Off duty he loved gaiety and happy guests.’

  – C. Wurtzburg, Raffles of the Eastern Isles

  * * *

  The girl in the Head of Protocol’s office inspected my letter from the Tourist Ministry with exactly the same facial expression the magic mechanic had used. I wondered if she weren’t perhaps his sister.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You cannot come into the State Palace of Bogor. Without the right letter, even a minister cannot come in. We need two weeks’ notice.’ She might have added, ‘In Raffles’ time anyone could come here, but now we are a democracy.’ I went into protracted displays of disappointment, mimed my desolation. Anger, I knew, would get me nowhere. Exciting pity might. A man appeared and they went into a huddle. I looked downcast and tearful. After a certain age, it is hard to look endearing.

  ‘It is all right,’ she said, soothingly. ‘We can change the date on the letter. My friend is willing to take you round. You have a camera?’

  ‘No camera. Is it not forbidden?’

  ‘It is forbidden to take photographs inside, but not outside.’ She swayed her hands from side to side as in a Javanese dance. ‘“Inside the palace” does not mean “inside the garden of the palace”. Also making movie films is forbidden. You do not intend to make movie films? Outside are the deer, many fine statues. It is a pity you have no camera. The soldiers too are very smart.’

  ‘Yes, a pity. I did not know.’

  We set off through a series of tall, carpeted rooms, furnished in heavy, bourgeois style. The thick carpet sucked at our feet. Great swags of red velvet hung at the windows. In the heat of Jakarta, this would be unbearable. Up here in the mountains it was cooler. There was dew on the grass.

  The furniture was an uncomfortable mix of modern and traditional, spindly forms of solid, expensive wood. Suddenly I realized where I had seen it before. It is the stuff with which the senior common rooms of redbrick universities are furnished. In England, those cupboards would be full of sherry glasses and the minutes of the last meeting.

  ‘There was a famous Englishman who lived in Bogor before,’ twinkled the guide. ‘He was called Raffles.’

  ‘Is anything left of what he built? There was a fire, an earthquake …’

  ‘No. The Dutch tore it all down. But all that was just an excuse. The Dutch wanted to rub him out. When they moved out, they took everything. All they left were those mirrors that were too heavy to shift.’

  We moved through another room, full of the flags of the unaligned nations and out onto an airy veranda with marble flags of a different sort, cane chairs, potted palms. Cooling views of the high mountains flaunted themselves through low cloud. Raffles wrote somewhere of the beauty of the views from his office. His wife revealed they could move him to tears. He had doubtless sat, snuffling, on this spot.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking how nice it would be to be an old colonist and sit here watching your gardeners working in the hot sun.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  He laughed and ushered me back inside.

  ‘Everyone thinks that here. Bung Karno was the last to really live in Bogor. Everyone else is afraid to come here because of ghosts. This was his bedroom.’

  There was a polished wood bed, looking vaguely foolish as beds do when unoccupied. All you can do is stare at them and imagine people in them, in itself a voyeuristic act. On the wall, scenes from the Mahabharata by Indonesian painters, nasty, over-busy productions that seemed desperately to be working up to the invention of the authentically Indonesian cherub.

  We walked on down a long corridor, being scrubbed by a team of workers with such enthusiasm it looked as if cleaning it were something they had wanted to do all their lives. He flung open another door. ‘This too was Bung Karno’s bedroom.’ As we moved round the palace, it became clear that Bung Karno had needed many bedrooms as he acquired and shed wives. The complexity of his marital life had finally led to the construction of bungalows in the grounds.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?’

  ‘No. I was born in Bogor. When I was a little boy, there were no railings around the palace and the garden wasn’t separate like now. But none of us dared come in. I used to stand and look in and one day Bung Karno saw me and waved to me. What other president would bother to wave to a little boy?’ I thought of Raffles and Muchi Abdullah. ‘… So ghosts here never bother me. They are friendly ghosts. This was Bung Karno’s office.’

  It was cordoned off. I peered round to try to look at the books on the shelves, seeing titles in Russian and German snarling across the spines. ‘Go on,’ he gave me a nudge. ‘You can go in if you like. I won’t tell.’ We stepped over the rope. A security man came up but said nothing, only grinned. There were silver-framed portraits of Nehru and others, now forgotten, with illegible scrawled dedications, a big desk with a fresh blotter, a complex paraphernalia of pens.

  ‘If you like,’ he whispered, ‘you can sit at Bung Karno’s desk. Go on. It’s all right.’ I perched demurely.

  ‘No, put your feet up, like he did.’ I tipped the chair back and swivelled tentatively. It took
only a small act of the imagination to see not Bung Karno but Raffles – but he would have had no stylish desk, but a stout, workmanlike table, paper wedged under one corner to stop it wobbling, and all the books would have been scattered about the room in constant use. No pen holder, quills rather – and half the geese on the pond slaughtered to make more pens for ever-scribbling Raffles.

  They looked at me eagerly, seeming to expect something more. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say or do. Perhaps Bung Karno had felt the same, sitting there in the 1950s with all Indonesia looking at him. Then the sun shifted and hit me full in the face. Sweat streamed down my forehead. I wiped it theatrically away. I got up.

  ‘Bung Karno’s chair is too hot, too heavy for me.’ It hit the culturally right note of total insincerity. They were pleased.

  As we passed on, the percentage of representations of naked women increased steeply. They were everywhere, sprawled languorously along the tops of bureaux, standing in bowls of water. Somewhere, Bung Karno remarked that near the ballroom in Bogor was a plaque showing the birth of Hercules surrounded by no less than fourteen beautiful women. At his own birth there was only one extremely old man present. I commented on it.

  ‘I think it is normal for men to like to look on women,’ the guide replied a little frostily. ‘This is Sarinah – a lady Bung Karno greatly … admired. You have heard of the chain of shops called Sarinah … named after her.’

  She was demurely beautiful, a slim, fair-skinned woman with a Javanese hairstyle. It was an accomplished painting that captured an impression of lightness and freshness. I looked at the signature. ‘Soekarno.’

  In Indonesia, every child learns that Sukarno was a gifted painter, but you always doubt such adulation. Politicians who are great artists are so the way Hitler was a great artist – by self-definition, daring others to disagree with them. Here was evidence Sukarno really could paint.

  The guide seemed to think so too. He came up very close and looked over my shoulder. I could smell clove cigarettes on the breath that tickled my ear. He spoke very quietly.

  ‘After the … New Order … When Bung Karno no longer really ran the country, they brought him here. He used to walk in the garden, but most of all paint. He always thought they would call him back – to take over, but he always saw himself as an artist. That’s what he really wanted to be. He wanted to have exhibitions. He liked artists. He told stories. If you ever heard him speak … He could hold a crowd … Politics wasn’t enough for a man gifted like that. He was an artist.’

  * * *

  Land was, for Raffles, the ultimate reality. His whole administration stands or falls on the question of land. He had read Adam Smith, the political economist, and believed in the naturalness and therefore goodness of unfettered trade, though himself obliged to operate within Company monopolies. Adam Smith made political liberality respectable by showing it was good for business. Petty despotism became the horror of the trading classes. It was these unexamined assumptions that moulded Raffles’ whole policy on land and the native rulers.

  One of the first acts of his administration was to set up an inquiry into landholding to discover precisely who had what rights in land. His aim was to give the peasants control over their own labour and the fruits of their labour, to free them from arbitrary taxation and rapacious officials. Raffles firmly believed in human nature and the natural good sense of his subjects. If it was in their own interests to be honest and industrious, then that is what they would become. It is this belief that makes Raffles a natural optimist and an attractive personality. It was, at that time, a revolutionary doctrine.

  A more generally held view of the nineteenth century, that Raffles too never quite shakes off, is that native peoples have innate characteristics, like breeds of dogs. According to the Dutch, Southeast Asians were idle, perfidious and untrustworthy. Raffles’ own committee, appointed to look into land reform, declared unreservedly that Javanese would never work unless compelled to. Luckily, he had the arrogance of his optimism and began his great experiment regardless. He believed in redemption through good works.

  * * *

  Many years later Raffles would observe the peasants of France and write:

  ‘… When I see every man cultivating his own field, I cannot but think him happier far than when he is cultivating the field of another; even if he labours more, that labour is still lighter which is his pride and pleasure, than that which is his burden and sorrow.’

  Yet, over a hundred years later, Sukarno would have the same insight, believing it to be a wholly original and Indonesian revelation, and make it the basis of a lifelong political philosophy:

  ‘On our islands are labourers poorer even than church rats – too pitiful financially to ever rise socially, politically, or economically – yet each is his own boss, beholden to no one. He is the horse-cart driver who owns his own horse and cart and employs no other manpower. And the self-employed fisherman whose total equipment including the rod, hook, line and proa [boat] is all his. And the farmer who is the sole owner and consumer of his product …

  Pedalling around aimlessly on my bicycle – thinking – I found myself in the southern part of Bandung, a compact agricultural area where you see many farmers in their little fields, each of which is less than a third of a hectare. My attention, for some reason, was captured by a peasant hoeing his property. He was alone. His clothes were shabby. This typical scene struck me as being symbolic of my people. I stood there a while contemplating it silently. We Indonesians being a warm, friendly sort, I approached him. In the regional Sundanese, I asked, “Who is the owner of this lot on which you are now working?”

  He said to me, “Why, I am, sir.”

  I said, “Tell me, does anyone own this with you?”

  “Oh, no, sir. I own it all by myself.”

  “Did you buy it?”

  “No. It was handed down from father to son for generations.”

  … “The crop on which you are working, for whom is it?”

  “For me, sir.”

  .… “Do you sell any of your produce?” I asked.

  “There is barely enough to keep us alive. There is no extra to sell.”

  I then asked this young farmer his name. And he told me, Marhaen. Marhaen is a common name like Smith or Jones. At that moment, the light of inspiration flooded my brain. I would use that name for all Indonesians with the same miserable lot. From then on I would call my people Marhaenists … Marhaenism is Indonesian Socialism in operation.’

  – C. Adams, Soekarno: An Autobiography

  * * *

  ‘Development News’ appeared on the TV screen accompanied by a vague thud of drums and shots of pipelines as at Tanjung Priok. Wheels of industry whirred for the camera and some vile pollutant squirted into the landscape as leanjawed young men in hard hats stared towards a better future like poor old Francis Light at Penang. On the table before them lay plans of some great enterprise on which they tapped with authoritative brown fingers.

  ‘I always mean to tell this programme about my grandmother and the telephone,’ said Agus, sipping at his whisky. ‘Mmm?’

  ‘You know I’m not from this island? Well, when I got this job, I paid for my parents to have the telephone. It was horribly expensive, but I have a friend who works for the company and my father is now village head … Anyway, whenever my grandmother answered the phone, she just shouted in it, “I can’t understand you!” and slammed it down.’ He giggled. ‘But it came in useful for the witchcraft, last year. There had been all sorts of things going wrong and finally she sent for the dukun, the old man who knew about such things, and he dug around and found something buried under the house. It was neighbours who had done it, of course. I don’t know what it was. We had to get rid of it in the sea.’ He preened his moustache thoughtfully, seeing the nameless horror in his mind. He shuddered.

  ‘The dukun said it was beyond him and my granny wanted me to get a proper Jakarta dukun, but I couldn’t afford to send him all the way t
o my village and you know their powers won’t work over water. So we used the telephone. He came here and talked down the phone and the words went out to the satellite and back to the village.’ He looked pleased with himself. ‘It was my idea.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He preened his moustache again.

  ‘So your granny isn’t frightened of the phone any more?’

  ‘Oh yes, she is. She’s terrified when it rings, it could be some dukun who’ll start whispering in her ear. She won’t answer it at all now.’

  * * *

  Before he left, Lord Minto did more than lay down the general political lines Raffles was to follow, he engaged in a very paternal action that showed his close personal relationship to Raffles. He sponsored him as a Mason.

  Freemasonry was rife in both the English and Dutch trading companies. Daendels, Raffles’ predecessor, had been so worried by the possibility of Masonic conspiracies that he decided to build a new club, the Harmonie, where expatriates would meet openly. In an attempt to encourage Dutch and British to mix, Raffles completed it with public funds.

  The list of Masons is inevitably incomplete, and the role of Freemasonry in empire is a huge book that remains to be written, but we do know that all Raffles’ immediate associates were members. He eschewed both the Batavia lodges at that time and joined a small lodge called ‘Virtutis et Artis Amici’ on the Pondok-Gedeh coffee plantations near Bogor. A fellow initiate was his Dutch ally, Muntinghe, and a fellow member, his future arch-enemy, General Gillespie. Raffles never mentions his Masonic activities, but accounts of Freemasonry in India and London dot the pages of his Java Government Gazette. From the records, we know that he took it seriously enough to rise to the third degree of Freemasonry during an overnight stay in Surabaya in 1813. Shortly before leaving Java he ‘received Perfection in the Rose Croix Chapter “La Vertueuse” in Batavia’, in the company of his secretary and his banker.

  The Masonic meeting house ‘Star of the East’ still stands in modern Jakarta, just round the corner from the street where the Harmonie embraced both Dutch and English. It is the area where Raffles and the other prominent members of the English community lived. The building was apparently known as ‘the house of demons’. In the square in front of it, Daendels had drilled his troops; the British used it for horse-racing.