From Jail to Jail. Tan Malaka
Indonesian nation will first begin when it is freed from imperialist domination” (Massa actie, p. 13). This was, and continues to be today, a hotly debated issue among historians of Indonesia.19
I shall discuss in my concluding section of this introduction my views on the importance of understanding the isolation that Tan Malaka experienced from Marxist theoretical discussions during the 1930s. Indeed, I argue that his political evolution ceased in the early 1920s and that he had little access to the intense debate in Marxist circles from that time on. The relevance of this view here is that, although written in the mid-1940s, From Jail to Jail should be analyzed in terms of the early 1920s. In this regard, the work of Arif Dirlik on Chinese Marxist historiography from 1919 to 1937 has considerable bearing on the subject, for a number of characteristics noted by Dirlik find an echo in Tan Malaka’s work.20
One such characteristic is an eclecticism incorporating various strands of Western thought. Tan Malaka discusses his progression from Nietzsche as thesis, Rousseau as antithesis, and Marx/Engels as synthesis. From Jail to Jail reveals, however, that attitudes and sympathies from Nietzsche and Rousseau persisted into the Marxist Tan Malaka’s Weltanschauung. A certain mechanical reductionism expressed so clearly in the evaluation of the Linggajati and Renville agreements, and admiration of power, in particular military might (shown in the description of the Japanese conquest of colonial Southeast Asia), bring echoes of Nietzsche in their wake. Rousseau’s romantic view of human nature and society forms a recurring contrapuntal theme to the text (for instance in a certain idealization of village life).
In his “lightning” sketch of the development of human thought and progress preceding Volume III, Tan Malaka displays this tendency toward an eclectic blending of a number of schools of thought, with particular emphasis given to Darwin. One can see parallels here with Marxist analysis developed in China during the 1920s in which “historical materialism appeared as a variant of evolutionist theory based on economic change.”21
In Vietnam, too, eclecticism and a Social Darwinist approach was predominant in the historiography of the 1920s, particularly among the bourgeois historians, although it was roundly denounced by the Marxist historians from about 1930 “as reactionary capitalist propaganda designed to legitimize ruthless exploitation of the lower classes.”22
Further, Tan Malaka echoes the Chinese Marxists in presenting economic change based on technological change as the motive force of history, with a concomitant downplaying of the role of social and class relations in the process: “forces of production” rather than “relations of production” form the focus of his attention, as we see in the following discussion.
It is clear, then, that in the three periods of Western society [500 B.C. to 1500; 1500 to 1850; and 1850 to today] . . . the relative position and value of the three principal cultural streams—religion, philosophy, and science—have changed. The conflict between these three streams and the corresponding changes in leadership of the social-political regime have had their roots in changes in the system of production based upon the existing technology.
From 500 B.C. to A.D. 1500, when supreme authority over society and the state was held by the priests and the nobility, productive labor was carried out by slaves (in Greece and Rome) or serfs (in Western Europe in the Middle Ages when technology included the water- or wind-driven mill). When the nobles and the philosophers held supreme authority in Western Europe, from 1500 to 1850, production was turning towards manufacturing, and steam-powered factories came into use. Finally, during the bourgeois period from 1850 to the present (1948), while the bourgeoisie has held social and state leadership in Western Europe and America . . . production has been controlled by finance capital and monopoly. The technical basis of production progressed swiftly from steam power to electric, oil, and now atomic power. (Volume III, pp. 25-26)
The smashing of the PKI in 1926-1927 put an end to any development of a Marxist historiography in preindependent Indonesia. Dirlik points to a similar cutoff of the debate in China at the same time, with the imposition of a strict party line from the Kremlin. In Indonesia, as indicated in Ruth McVey’s study of the PKI’s early period, the debate had not reached as rich a level as it had in China.23 It is beyond the scope of this work to compare PKI and CPP historiography, but such a study could be extremely valuable and could explore the importance of such factors as the stultifying nature of the colonial government in Indonesia vis à vis the uneven repression in China, the Confucian tradition of scholarship and historiography versus the fragmented and demoralized scholarship in Indonesia, and the debilitating effect of the exile of many PKI leaders.
As Autobiography
From Jail to Jail has significance in another regard: as the autobiography of an Indonesian written in the 1940s it is a rare document, and, as the autobiography of an Asian Marxist from that period it stands as one of a handful of texts.
Autobiography as a genre emanating from a particular time and place, and, as a particular cultural attitude towards self and society, has been the object of study in recent years for, among others, Erik Erikson, Roy Pascal, James Olney, and Georges Gusdorf. Gusdorf commented, “The concern which seems so natural to us, to turn back and look on one’s own past, to recollect one’s life in order to narrate it, is not at all universal. It asserts itself only in recent centuries and only on a small part of the map of the world.”24 The relative paucity of autobiography in the Indonesian and Malay world has been remarked on by a number of scholars and has been ascribed to the lack of “individuation” in Southeast Asian societies, “in which, for one reason or another, the importance of the individual is subsumed within that of the community, or in which the individual must of necessity . . . be held to embody the virtues (or vices) of the society as a whole.”25
A seminar on the topic was held in Melbourne in 1974, and the papers were later published. A. H. Johns discusses the Indonesian situation in his essay, “From Caricature and Vignette to Ambivalence and Angst: Changing Perceptions of Character in the Malay World,” in which he comments on the long gap in “expression of individuality” between the publication of the Malay official Abdullah Abdul Kadir Munshi’s autobiography, Hikayat Abdullah, in 1849 and Kartini’s letters, first published in 1911.26 In his introductory essay to the papers from this seminar, Wang Gungwu modified Roff’s approach to the reasons for this late development of biography.
It is possible that deep down there is an indigenous indifference to the life of mere mortals which finds the idea of biography irrelevant if not useless; but more likely, the confusion of multiple and often conflicting foreign influences in the region has not permitted new ideas about the Self in Biography to take firm root and acquire strong adherents and stimulate local practitioners.27
Born in 1797, a hundred years before Tan Malaka, Munshi was the first Malay/Indonesian autobiographer. His Hikayat Abdullah, written between 1840 and 1843, recorded the events of his life in Malacca and Singapore. With a background in Koranic, Malay, and English learning, he moved in Malay and European circles working, inter alia, as a scribe for Sir Stamford Raffles. His text has not only some structural parallels with Tan Malaka’s text (discussed above, p. xxxiii), but also parallels in autobiographical style. As his translator comments,
Abdullah was the first writer in Malay to bring realism to this art, to see events of everyday life from the standpoint of the common experience of mankind and not through the tinted spectacles of legend and romance. . . .
The great value of his work lies not in the dry record of a period well-served by the chronicler and the annalist, but in the intimate pen-pictures he gives of the personalities of his time. The author is at his best describing a person’s sifat, his appearance manners and attitude to those round him from which his character is inferred.28
I know of only two Indonesian autobiographical works to be published during the next hundred years: Pangeran Achmad Djajadiningrat’s Herinneringen (1936), and Soetomo’s Kenang-kenangan (1938). One might stretch a point and mention two compilations of letters: Raden Adjeng Kartini’s Door duisternis tot licht, written in Dutch, 1899 to 1904, and published in English as Letters of a Javanese Princess (1964), and Sutan Sjahrir’s Indonesische