by Nigel Barley
‘Yes, I read about it.’
‘It was joke of course. The Sultan was supposed to meet them. “No,” he said, “Paku Alam, you meet them. Your family always got on very well with the English.” He still has the carriage.’
‘The carriage?’
‘Yes. It is bright yellow, very smart. Kyai Manik Koemolo, “the Sacred Jade Bead”, it is called. Raffles knew the way to his heart. He gave the Paku Alam the carriage. Carriages were important here.’
* * *
‘Tunjong Segara,’ said Lukas. ‘I asked an old man in the palace. At first he said it as the name of an offering to Loro Kidul. Then he said the name was a man’s name, an old-fashioned hero’s name. It is from the Loro Kidul stories. It is Nyi Blorong’s father-in-law. Why should they give Raffles’ daughter a name like that?’
* * *
There is another town on the island of Java specially close to Loro Kidul, Pelabuhan Ratu, ‘Queen’s harbour’. At one end of the town, Bung Karno built a hotel. He had half the hillside blasted away to do it. It stands there now, a monument to the awfulness of the concrete architecture of the period, bland, grey, characterless, a Waffen-SS headquarters under the palm trees. On the beach they set an unfortunately worded sign, ‘The sea here is very dangerous with many strong currents and many have been drowned – so always be careful to swim in the sea.’
On the ground floor was a marketing convention. ‘A brighter future through more aggressive marketing’ trumpeted a sign. I had seen another such in Jakarta; Indonesians with clipboards listening with serious politeness to strident Americans who poked them with suitably aggressive index fingers, called them impertinently, ‘buddy’ and ‘sweetheart’ and evangelized on behalf of acquired arrogance and rudeness. ‘We are still a mentally colonized people,’ one exquisitely polite lady had explained to me. ‘Bung Karno always said we could only overcome it and become truly Indonesian through becoming like our colonial masters. That is the paradox of Indonesia.’
On the second floor is a room not available for letting, for it is already permanently let – to Loro Kidul, the goddess of the South Sea. You can drop the man on the desk a small sum to get the key. It’s a perfectly ordinary room, but excessively feminine, covered in Barbara Cartland flounces and reeking of stale perfume. Blue watered silk and green frills recall the element in which the goddess moves. The bed is showered with rose petals, the floor with offerings of feminalia, mirrors, makeup, scent – the goddess is particularly fond of Impulse. Devotees come here to consult Loro Kidul. It is especially a resort of film stars. Before they dare shoot a single frame, the Indonesian soft-porn actresses, all good spiritual girls, have to ask polite pardon for their impersonations.
It is a curious experience for someone to go to the goddess’s bedroom if they have ever lived in West Africa, as I had. Loro Kidul’s portrait hangs over the bed, fair skin, flashing eyes, long storm-tossed hair. It is the face of Mammy Wata, the African goddess of love, wealth and fertility recorded in paintings and carvings from Mauretania to the Congo. Art historians will tell you that the Africans’ idea of her has been fixed by a famous Indian print of a light-skinned Hindu goddess wrestling with snakes that was sold all over the continent in the early years of this century. European ships’ figureheads also had a hand, or perhaps bosom, in her appearance. However you explain it, it is recognizably the same goddess.
The interesting thing is that the room was installed on the personal orders of Bung Karno. As ruler of Java, like the royal families he replaced, an aspect of his legitimacy had to be a relationship with the goddess. So they met in the modern way, a swift assignation on the second floor of a hotel where they take American Express, as Jakarta businessmen doubtless still meet their extra-marital friends nowadays.
Raffles, too, was a ruler of Java. What more natural, then, than that he should have been associated with Loro Kidul? He himself was born at sea. So was his daughter. Perhaps the name they gave her was a sign he was being slowly sucked into the currents of Javanese myth, a brighter future through more aggressive marketing.
* * *
I set off for the railway station. On a corner was a newspaper-seller. As he handed me a copy, he remarked sadly, ‘Nyi Slamet is dead.’ It was the big news. It had driven even the President’s latest speech off the front page. She had died in the royal palace in Solo. Her many daughters had clustered round the body in inexpressible grief. There was to be a state funeral costing millions of rupiahs. Only after working my way through the whole article did I realize that Nyi Slamet was not a human being but a buffalo, a sacred white buffalo.
Hope and Glory
‘“It’s a good thing the British did come,” Leonore said presently. “How are Mr Raffles’ reforms getting on, Dirk?”
“Why,” I answered … “why you’ve only got to keep your eyes open to find the answer to that question. Have you ever seen the natives looking so contented and prosperous before? That’s because they’re free now for the first time in memory. No more compulsory coffee-cultivation, no more forced labour, but every man at liberty to grow what he likes and do what he likes with his own.”
“And before long there’s going to be an end to the extortions of all the native officials, I hear,” Bertram put in, taking his cue from Leonore.
“Unless we have to give Java back to the Dutch, which God forbid,” I said.’
– H. Banner, The Clean Wind: An Historical Novel of Romance and Adventure
Raffles abolished the government licences for gambling and cock-fighting, further cutting revenue. Gambling was an evil because it led to debt and debt to people selling themselves into slavery. He would fight tooth and nail to keep both out of Singapore. Slavery, for Raffles, was simply bad in itself, but could not be banned according to the Dutch law under which he was forced to operate. Even British law was unclear on the matter, possibly deliberately so. So Raffles revived the controls on it that had fallen into disuse but were still on the statute books. Gradually, he managed to ban the importation of slaves. In all this he showed himself carefully legalistic. It was revolution in complete accordance with the by-laws.
With opium, he was on more dangerous ground. It was a major source of profit for the Company, and could not be banned out of hand, so he controlled it and throttled back its consumption through customs regulations. Despite the protests from merchants, Minto backed him up. He had a firm friend in the Governor-General’s palace. Always, justification of his actions had to be dissimulated into terms of financial sharp-dealing. It was not enough to argue that pushing opium was wrong. It had to be maintained that there was more profit to be had from a sober and industrious population. We should not necessarily believe such thoughts were uppermost in Raffles’ mind. Elsewhere, he shows his true colours:
‘It now becomes necessary that Government should consider the inhabitants without reference to bare mercantile profits and to connect the sources of the revenues with the general prosperity of the Colony.’
How different was the Dutch view, can be seen by the puzzlement expressed by Muntinghe, Raffles’ loyal supporter and fellow Council member, to the proposed reform of the land revenue:
‘The amelioration however of the natives of this island, though undoubtedly a consideration of the highest moment in the eyes of humanity, seems to me to become only a secondary object in a political point of view; and with the exception that every measure contrary to the principles of justice and equity it appears to me that the safest principle that can be adopted to judge of the propriety of any Colonial regulations, or of any changes or alterations to be introduced therein is that every Colony does or ought to exist for the benefit of the mother country.’
Yet the new system was pushed through solely because of Raffles’ own determination and conviction that this was the greatest contribution he could make to those neglected ‘little people’ of Java. Raffles was the first Westerner to notice that the ‘little people’ were there at all, except as beasts of burden or picturesque figures t
o pleasantly animate a landscape, and not until Bung Karno would most wealthy Indonesians become aware of them.
Raffles’ new treaties with the sultans opened up wide areas of the country where the landlord was now the central government – which in fact meant Raffles. He was determined that as few middlemen as possible should stand between him and the peasants. Native officials would become salaried, not carried upon the backs of the farmers. Rent would be related to income. Economic freedom would be the guiding principle that would encourage enterprise and civilization.
Any man who invokes high principle will rightly be suspected of low hypocrisy. Some Dutch researchers have been keen to see in Raffles a Machiavellian humbug, as a way of comparatively reducing the viciousness of the Dutch system he replaced. His salary and expenses have been meticulously examined and held to show profiteering. The reforms he effected are dismissed as only paper reforms. The huge sums to be raised in revenue were never, it is said, collected. On his own estates, Raffles had slaves and he kept up forced coffee deliveries in his own area of Buitenzorg; indeed, he intensified the burdens on labour there. The survey on which the scheme was based was impossible at that time. The need to pay tax in money drove the peasants into the arms of Chinese money-lenders and debt slavery – and so on.
There is an element of truth in all this. Dreams, after all, can remain perfect only as long as no one tries to turn them into reality.
Complicated tasks of assessment and record-keeping were demanded of illiterate village headmen who were anyway firmly trapped in obligations of kinship to those they were to administer. But Raffles was desperately short of competent, honest staff and was in daily expectation of being replaced by a military governor. He held the levers of power, but was anything attached to the ends of those levers? The only way he could begin to know what was going on was to get out into the fields as often as he could. There, one suspects, he was told what people thought he wanted to hear.
Yet when the Dutch took back Java, they needed only to make small adjustments to Raffles’ system to make the whole thing work. They had another hundred years. Raffles did not.
* * *
‘The National Planning Council, founded in 1959, produced in 1960 a vast document containing an Eight-Year Plan of Indonesian Economic Development. The planners, however, seem to have been more concerned with the symbolic importance of the plan than with its implementation. The document contained 5,000 pages divided into 17 volumes, and eight books containing exactly 1,945 paragraphs. The implication, of course, was that the plan was based on the spirit of 17–8–1945 [the date of the Indonesian Declaration of Independence].’
– C. Penders, The Life and Times of Soekarno
‘Over there,’ said Aneka, pointing with her knife, ‘where the garage is now, is where we used to keep the rice. It was all ricefields where those houses are, but the farmers weren’t allowed to sell us anything directly. The government bought it up and took it away. Then a truck would come once a month, with soldiers, and dump different rice in the garage. It was rice the government collected in tax. Because my father had been in a ministry and knew Bung Karno, we were in charge of doling out rice to the whole area. And it was terrible rice, but we had no choice, we had to eat it.’
We were in Jakarta at the end of the dry season, eating durian – the fruit like a football-sized conker, whose taste is halfway between caramel and swamp-water, with an after-whiff of rancid armpits. I remembered, irrelevantly, that the smell of it made Raffles sick. Aneka was in her thirties, very pretty, a doctor in one of the government clinics. She was obliged to work there for another fifteen years to repay her training. I was not quite sure that it was proper for us to be eating durian. After all, it lives in Indonesian mythology as a notorious aphrodisiac. She incised the fruit with unerotic, surgical precision between good strong hands, as if lancing an abscess.
‘My big brother used to steal the rice and give it to friends in school who had nothing to eat. Because we had government connections, he knew we could get more.’ She pouted sulkily. No, she was not pouting, just ejecting an unchewable seed. She threw it away and waved her fingers. ‘The boys were allowed to go out on demonstrations, but girls were not, and there were demonstrations almost every day against the imperialists.’ She grinned, plucked forth a slug of rich, yellow flesh and slid it into her mouth. ‘One day they helped wreck the British ambassador’s car. My brothers’ contribution was to rip the door handles off. They brought them home.’
* * *
Raffles had fallen foul of the military. He was trying to send the troops back to Bengal to cut the costs of this, his ‘other India’. Gillespie had not forgiven the business at Yogya, and other sources of friction had added personal rancour to professional disagreement. Gillespie had bought slave girls, refused to pay the peasants for labour on his estate. He and Raffles were temperamentally unsuited.
Gillespie was an upper-class lout of Irish extraction. His life was dotted with brawls and duels, debts, promiscuously sired bastards, acts of mindless heroism. He was the sort who is indispensable in war and unbearable in peace. Raffles was fifteen years younger, adamantly civilian, and would boast that he had never watched a horse race nor fired a gun in his life. Worse, he lacked breeding and had culture. He read books.
They bickered and snarled at each other over the Council table. For all his generosity of spirit, Raffles seems to have been unable to cope with opposition. It would be the same in Singapore with Governor Farquar. He wanted love. People either had to convert, almost religiously, to love – or go.
Finally he arranged for Minto to replace Gillespie, who had anyway asked to be recalled. But Minto himself was soon to be replaced by a soldier. Lord Moira, sent to India by his friend and fellow Freemason the Prince Regent to replenish his depleted coffers from the public purse. Minto tried, yet again, to protect Raffles. If all else failed, he assured him the posting to Bengkulu in Sumatra, but surely things could not come to that?
‘Minto was not to depart until over two months after Moira’s arrival, so there was the unusual situation of the old and the new Governors-General being in India at the same time. Minto, however, was not the sort to create any difficulties. As he amusingly put it: “I think the rising and the setting suns may drive their chariots very peacefully and amicably round the Calcutta Course.”’
– C. Wurtzburg, Raffles of the Eastern Isles
* * *
‘Rice,’ said Aneka. ‘All my childhood, my dreams were full of rice. I used to dream about Bung Karno’s rice coming every month.’
‘You were hungry?’ I pictured her, huge mouth and eyes, limbs like a stick insect.
‘No, of course not. We always had enough food. It was all my father’s fault. He scared us to death. It started with oranges.
‘Oranges?’
‘Yes. He told me that if I swallowed orange pips, orange trees would grow out of the top of my head and I’d have great branches coming through my skull. It’s impossible to eat oranges without swallowing some of the little pips. Think of the agony! I used to run round holding my head and groaning for hours, thinking I could feel them starting to grow roots. In the end I stopped eating oranges.’
‘What about the rice?’
‘He told us if we didn’t finish up our rice every day, the Rice Giant would come and get us – and we all believed it. People like you are always writing about the Rice goddess, how the people in the country worship her, though they are Muslims or Hindus. Well with us it was the Rice Giant. He said, when it was dark, the rice we left would turn into the giant and come and get us.’
She leaped to her feet, puffed out her cheeks and lumbered round the room, arms swinging in simian fashion. Out of her mouth came a great growling chant with thudding rhythms, a thud for each footfall:
‘Where’s that little girl Aneka?
Left her rice. I’ve come to take her.’
She broke off, held her head and howled – laughing at the same time in recollection of child
hood pain and innocence.
* * *
With the arrival of Lord Moira as Governor-General, the tone of letters from India changes abruptly. Gone are friendly support and fatherly advice. All is suspicion, rebuke and irritation. The father has become a headmaster. The Japanese trade is declared a disaster and forbidden. Waspish comments are made about the continuing failure of Java to make a profit despite the rosy prospects initially held out. Gillespie, arriving in India, files a long series of charges against Raffles, alleging arrogance, incompetence and corruption. They are taken very seriously.
The principal problem lay in the land sales to redeem the bad paper money issued by the Dutch. Raffles never made any secret of the fact that he was himself a buyer of land auctioned off by the government. It is the land bought in this transaction that will ultimately become the Botanic Garden at Bogor. It is clear that he used his participation to push up prices – to the great annoyance of his partners. There was an unwillingness to buy land from an administration whose title might not be recognized if Dutch government returned. By risking his own capital – actually borrowed – Raffles was able to increase confidence in the security of the transactions and so bring the sales to a conclusion of measured success. But it all looked very suspicious to a Company that assumed peculation in all levels of its officials, and it was hardly prudent behaviour.
Despite the firm support of the whole Council, Raffles would never quite clear himself of official suspicion. He would always be regarded as someone who got caught with his hand in the till. The Supreme Government in London was anyway increasingly inclined to write off the whole business of Java: Java had already cost it nearly five million Spanish dollars. With the defeat of Napoleon, it was the demands of a European peace that were uppermost in everyone’s minds. Raffles and Java were suddenly irrelevant. Nobody cared. Raffles was slow to read the signs and foolishly submitted a plan for taking over the Philippines. He did not yet know that no one in London bothered to read his letters any more.
