by Nigel Barley
* * *
The house was an old Dutch building with thick walls and awkwardly high ceilings that made the proportions of the rooms seem all wrong. Aneka and her family lived there with haughty cats and purring servants. Fearing native pilferage and insurrection, the Dutch had built a strongroom at the rear of the house with a huge iron door, as in a bank vault. It had proved impossible to demolish, so it had been converted into a bathroom whose solidity was in keeping with a Muslim sense of eternally endangered physical virtue. In the evenings, when the television was on, showing American trash with subtitles, the cats would permit themselves to be stroked and the servants would creep in silently and crouch on the stairs to watch their favourite programmes.
Everyone had seen ghosts. Their existence was treated as a matter of established fact. There was a nocturnal revenant who took leisurely showers behind the thick, iron door and occasionally sang in Dutch. Another filled empty rooms with the smell of cheroots. At one time there had been many, many more – all Dutch, some unfriendly. In the end, a dukun had been sent for and, in a long ceremony, he had commanded them to decamp to the Town Hall, the proper place, it was felt, for dead Dutchmen.
* * *
The Java Government Gazette of 3 December 1814 appeared framed in funereal black. ‘The numerous assemblage of persons of both sexes to assist at the mournful ceremony of paying the last duties and honours to the deceased, and the general and marked expression of grief which was there evinced, is the best proof of the respect and regard which her benevolence and manners had acquired amongst all classes …’ Olivia Raffles was dead. She was buried beside Leyden in Jakarta and on her tomb Raffles set the first verse of a poem she had written to the dead poet:
‘Oh thou whom ne’er my constant heart
One moment hath forgot
Tho’ fate severe hath bid us part
Yet still forget me not.’
Raffles would soon learn of the death of Lord Minto. He was now terribly alone, exposed to his enemies. The news from Europe was good, which is to say bad for Java. Napoleon was defeated. Raffles now knew his beloved Java was about to be taken from him and restored to the Dutch. He collapsed and his friends feared for his life.
* * *
I was transported by taxi to Aneka’s hospital, feeling very Indonesian, plugging into a circle of professional friends like this – also ill. Flu was sweeping the capital, a cold-season disease in humid heat. I could not breathe. ‘My lungs,’ I explained in resisting Indonesian, ‘feel as though they are full of feathers.’ Bulu, ‘feathers’, is also ‘hair’ and ‘wool’ and ‘fur’. I could not imagine what it was this sentence made them picture. To have feathers in one’s lungs was a precise sensation – but fur?
Aneka nodded and probed stethescopically. There was a flurry of excited voices outside the room and a woman was carried in, perfectly stiff, feet vertical, like a magician’s assistant arrested halfway through an act of levitation. I made way before the urgency of the case and was waved outside to wait.
It was a thoroughly decent hospital, like those of my childhood, before four-hour queues and institutional arrogance were introduced. A clutch of schoolchildren, come for vaccinations, were radiating intense health like a fire radiates heat into an icy room. The man beside me had some unintelligible affliction that required an intravenous drip, but there were no stands for drips bags, so he was required to hold it for hours above his own head.
‘The woman,’ he flapped the raised hand sagaciously towards the door, ‘she was hit by a truck.’ As he spoke the door opened and she walked out, perfectly well – surely through some Lazarus-like resurrection – but sobbing, and I was beckoned back in.
‘She was hit by a truck?’ They stared at me, then laughed.
‘No,’ said Aneka, ‘she was angry, that’s all.’
‘Angry?’
‘Yes. It happens often. People put up with things and smile and smile, but inside they rage. Then, maybe after years, suddenly they cannot bear it any more and they scream and swear and fall over. The secret is to make them cry. They cry and at once they are better.’
The neat opposite, then, of the running amok so feared by colonial Europeans. She probed again, diagnosed congestion of the lungs, gave me a prescription a foot long that was condensed by a miracle of micro-technology into micro-pills in a micro-bottle. On it was written ‘For hairy lungs’.
* * *
‘“Look, look, Timmerhout!” my chief exclaimed, pointing to a streak of glittering silver on the north-western horizon. “There is the Batavia roadstead, with the ships as distinct as though they lay only a mile or two away … And there see,” he went on, wheeling to face the south, “is Wijnkoops Bay, clearer still … Tell me, Timmerhout, are you susceptible to the spiritual exaltation of a great mountain such as this?”
“It certainly does make one’s own personal troubles seem very remote and small, sir,” I answered, not quite certain, however, whether I had rightly interpreted his meaning.
“Yes,” he mused, “it does that indeed. But it does more. Timmerhout. It fills a thinking man’s heart with an overwhelming conviction of God’s eternal presence; it leaves him strong in the belief that destiny is ultimately conquerable, that for the man who lays his life and fortune in the hand which shaped these noble summits out of chaos there can be no such word as defeat … Whenever the darkness seems impenetrable, Timmerhout, climb a mountain.”’
– H. Banner, The Clean Wind: An Historical Novel of Romance and Adventure
Raffles did more than climb a mountain. He went on a tour of the island, indeed, visited Bali. A fashionable belief of the nineteenth century was that a man was given a finite amount of ‘vital force’. Once it was used up, you died. Therefore it made sense to be frugal in the expenditure of energy. Raffles, clearly, had nothing to do with this view. Energy, like money, had to be spent wisely but generously. Moreover it was not pantheism that revived Raffles. Rather, it was science and scholarship. The climbing of mountains was effected not with wild Romanticism, but with thermometers, so that the peaks’ heights might be accurately calculated from the drop in temperature between bottom and top. He still wanted to really know Java.
Newly bereaved, he writes a long letter to Marsden, the eminent Malay scholar, on the comparative history and culture of the archipelago. A few months later, he is greatly revived by collecting information on the volcanic eruption on Sumbawa. But the greatest restorative is to retire with ‘several of his staff, and a party of natives, whose good sense and intelligence had attracted his notice, and whom he had brought with him from the eastern part of the island.
‘With these last he passed the greater part of every morning and evening in reading and translating, with the greatest rapidity and ease, the different legends with which they furnished him …’
‘I have lately made a very considerable addition to my Malayan, as well as Javanese library … It has given a fashion for literary pursuits which cannot fail of being highly advantageous to all parties in the long run. A taste for letters is now the sure passport to preferment … The Dutch colonists accuse us of folly … Objects have a different appearance when received by the rising sun, to what they may present to one who is setting.’
– T. S. Raffles
* * *
I had gone to an art show in Jakarta, paintings made in the field by an eminent Indonesian anthropologist whose unsuspected vice was art – a visual retrospective of a life of scholarship. There were all the standard ethnographic hits, Asmat, Toraja, Bali – the ‘tribal’ face of Indonesia. The gallery was full of the rich and famous, fluttering and cooing at each other. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, newspaper tycoons, their wives decked in gold and Dior – each worth twenty or thirty thousand pounds on the hoof.
In one corner stood a somewhat seedy man, paunched, batik shirt too tight, chain-smoking in defiance of signs to the contrary.
‘I’m the manager of the gallery,’ he explained, twitching.
‘A di
fficult show?’ I asked.
He looked at me and spoke with slow but deadly emphasis. ‘When I get through here, I’m never going to have another show with a living artist, with opinions and views about how you hang his stuff. Only dead artists. And no widows. Widows are worse than artists. Widows “cherish the memory”. And no loyal friends. Friends make you tired with their adoration. Ignore the whole bunch of them. They tell you lies. Dead artists, no widows, no friends. That’s the only path to truth.’
* * *
It was a period of quiet content. Raffles was soothed by sheer busy scholarship. Then, out of the blue, came news from London. He was fired. He would not even be suffered to superintend the transfer of power back to Holland.
The English and Dutch accounts vary at this point. The Dutch tell of the rapturous joy amongst the settlers that greeted the realization that the Dutch were to return. The English dwell on their own dismay that the British hold over Java was to be so short. Typically, Raffles’ concern was for the Javanese. He sought to make sure that the British treaties with the rulers would be honoured. One aged chieftain was asked how he felt about the impending change.
‘Can’t you fancy a young and beautiful widow, who has been joined to a harsh and withered old man, but has lost him and is wedded to a liberal and gallant young bridegroom – can’t you fancy how she will rejoice when she finds the old man returned to life again and come to claim her?’
Arise, Sir Stamford
Raffles set sail on 25 March 1816 with two friends, Travers and Garnham, his physician, two Malay clerks and a Javanese nobleman, Raden Rana Dipura. Although the Company post at Bengkulu was assured to him, their destination was England, on medical grounds. Physically and emotionally, Raffles was exhausted. Raffles’ thirty tons of baggage and ‘native curiosities’ would ultimately feed Britain’s museums, but for the moment they simply drained his purse and proved his eccentricity. In London there would be much talk of a Papuan he brought with him and the excitement aroused by his physical similarity to the Africans. Raffles had acquired the boy, some ten years old, in Bali ‘under very peculiar circumstances’, and named him Dick. It is only by a chance footnote in the History of Java that we know he was alive at all and not a pickled specimen. Alive or not, he would remain a mere specimen to the West. A ‘white Papuan’ had been owned by the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences for some time.
The other Orientals of the party were largely beneath official concern. They had only a ghostly existence, mere Javanese shadow puppets. Travers remarks on the presence of Lewis, a Malaccan servant who had been with Raffles for some years. The Malay clerks, we learn, were terribly seasick, and on the return journey only one will be mentioned. Once in London, Raffles clearly had fun astonishing Raden Rana with electricity and the opening of Parliament. On the return journey two boys will mysteriously appear, educated at Sir Stamford’s expense, though one promptly does a bunk. One would like to know more of them, for it is not in the large flat planes that a man’s life may be known, but in the interstices.
Recent events in Java had been of a kind to make Raffles reflective. He was still severely ill. ‘The family’ arranged for Travers to present him with a gift of plate and a loyal address on the third day out. His writings show us a man who is very nearly broken:
‘This last and unexpected proof of your attachment and esteem is too much for me; it is more than, in the shattered state of my existence, I can bear without an emotion which renders it impossible for me to reconcile my feelings with the ordinary feelings of consideration …
You have been with me in the days of happiness and joy – in the hours that were beguiled away under the enchanting spell of one, of whom the recollection awakens feelings which I cannot suppress. You have supported and comforted me under the affliction of her loss … You have seen and felt what the envious and disappointed have done to supplant me in the public opinion and to shake the credit of my public and the value of my private character; and now that I bend before the storm, which it is neither in my power to avert or control, you come forward to say that, as children of one family, you will hold to me through life. What must be my emotions I leave to the feelings which dictated your address to decide, for, in truth, I cannot express my own …’
In the recent past, Raffles was denigrated as paternalist. He himself would probably not have resisted the term. When planning to set up his free medical service for Java, he explicitly speaks of ‘paternal care and consideration’ for the local population. The term implied, for him, the responsibility and benevolence that go with power and – of course – love.
More recently, the term ‘Orientalism’ has been raised as a stick with which to beat Raffles, incorporating him in an approach to the East that insistently imposes upon it an exotic, timeless and feminized quality. The age that has invented sexual politics inevitably sees it as much worse to treat someone as female than as a child.
Like all other interpreters, Raffles was always able to dismiss much of what he saw as adventitious, alien to the true character of Southeast Asia. A wise interpreter – even then – usually found truth to lie some way behind the appearances, and Raffles was a committed optimist. The despotic nature of Javanese rulers was not seen as inherent to the political system as a whole. It could be neatly excised as an aberration. He honestly believed he could represent the interests of the people against their own rulers and be seen by them to do so. He did not realize that an outsider would always be seen as attacking the people by attacking their rulers.
The untidy state of Malay institutions, he was convinced, must hide some more historic unity or empire. He and Leyden invented the office of Bitara, the ancient ruler over such a unity. They strove to create its reality in a pan-Indonesian-Malay federation beneath the Governor-General, the good Bitara Minto, as Sukarno would later dream of a similar unity called Nusantara, with himself at its head.
Yet Raffles turned a page in the history of empire. He articulated in his words and actions the principle that the good of the ruled must lie above the commercial interests of the ruler. As a man of his age, he was blissfully unaware of the difficulty of defining what was ‘good’, but had he been less naive, philosophical sophistication would surely have led to administrative impotence. That he was dismissed says much about the reception of his benevolent principles at home, but it should not lead us to doubt the intellectual honesty of Raffles himself.
‘To us, a head of state is like a head of family. In Moslem custom the father makes all decisions for his family. The elder or village chief shoulders all burdens for his village. This has been the Indonesian way through centuries.’
– C. Adams, Soekarno: An Autobiography
* * *
On his way home, Raffles was to be presented with a chance to see himself in a distorting mirror. There was another man of energy and vision, an organizer, a revolutionary, a practical dreamer on his route. St Helena was a Company port. His initial disappointment on seeing Napoleon recalls that of Munshi Abdullah on seeing the Governor-General of all India, Lord Minto.
‘Our first view of him was from the window across the lawn, where we beheld, not what we expected, an interesting, animated and martial figure but a heavy, clumsy-looking man, moving with a very awkward gait, and reminding us of a citizen lounging in the tea-gardens about London on a Sunday afternoon … Now, then, behold me in the presence of certainly the greatest man of the age. I will not attempt to describe to you the feelings with which I approached him; let it suffice that they were in every way favourable to him … His talents had always demanded my admiration, and in the brilliancy of this side of his character. In a word, I felt compassion for his present situation.’
The feeling was not to last. It is not fanciful to see Raffles as identifying himself in his own reduced circumstances with the broken Emperor. He must have been unusual in feeling compassion for Napoleon at a time when anti-French hysteria was still at fever-pitch. When he writes of Bengkulu, he will no longer term it ‘this
other India’, but rather, ‘this other Elba’. He had doubtless expected to see a noble vision of frustrated and wronged brilliance. Napoleon, however, offends. He is physically distasteful. He has no thoughts of courtesy or kindness. He fires off questions without even bothering to listen to the answers. He keeps his hat off, so that everyone else, out of politeness, needs must do likewise. He is bad tempered and arrogant. Raffles is shocked.
‘… This man is a monster, who has none of those feelings of the heart which constitute the real man. I was favourably inclined to him; I compassioned his situation, but from the moment I came into his presence these feelings subsided, and they gave place to those of horror, disgust and alarm; I saw in him a man determined and vindictive, without one spark of soul, but possessing a capacity and talent calculated to enslave mankind. I saw in him that all this capacity, all this talent, was devoted to himself and his own supremacy. I saw that he looked down on all mankind as his inferiors, and that he possessed not the smallest particle of philosophy. I looked upon him as a wild animal caught, but not tamed. He is, in short, all head and no heart – a man who may by his ability command respect, but by his conduct can never ensure the affection of anyone … The alarm I felt was lest he should escape.’
Raffles has been confronted with the face of naked power – devoid of love – and finds it unbearable. It was his own adherence to the creed of common humanity that would be the greatest obstacle to his memory in the East, a memory he thought was assured by his benevolence. For benevolence associated him with the common, with weakness. A true leader is admired for the display of power and ruthlessness. So it is Daendels, ‘the Dutch Napoleon’ as he was called, who is remembered in Indonesia, not Raffles. He simply didn’t kill enough people.
