From Jail to Jail. Tan Malaka
bonds that had tied the party to the mass Muslim organization, Sarekat Islam. He spoke strongly at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922 of the need for the International to recognize the progressive role of pan-Islam as a anti-imperialist force. Some commentators have regarded Tan Malaka as a follower, and, indeed, even as a leader, of Islam.34 Rudolf Mrázek has given considerable emphasis to Tan Malaka’s view of Islam as an advance over the “ancient culture, full of error, passivity and fossilized ideas.”35 Certainly Tan Malaka saw Islam as a historical advance over animism and, indeed, Hinduism, but this no more makes him a believer than his views of capitalism as an advance over feudalism make him pro-capitalist.
Indeed, as early as 1922 Tan Malaka had placed his support of pan-Islam firmly in the context of the struggle against imperialism:
Alongside the crescent, the star of the Soviets will be the great battle emblem of approximately 250 million Muslims of the Sahara, Arabia, Hindustan and our Indies. . . . let us realise that the millions of proletarian Muslims are as little attracted to an imperialist pan-Islamism as to Western imperialism.36
The man who emerges from this text is one with simple tastes and pleasures. The only possessions he mentions with affection are books, and he even envies Trotsky, sent off to Siberian exile with crates of them, while Tan Malaka, always on the run, had to discard his books on more than one occasion for fear they would incriminate him. One particularly poignant episode recounts him throwing his notebooks into the sea off southern Burma for fear of discovery on arrival in Rangoon (Volume II, p. 92). The bookshop on the corner of Jacobijnestraat, where he lived in Haarlem, remained a fond recollection from his school days in Holland, as did the Raffles Museum in Singapore and the museum library in Jakarta, where he spent time during the Japanese occupation.
Aside from his books, those who knew him during the revolution recall that he only devoted some attention to a Chinese walking stick with an elaborately carved handle in the shape of a dragon’s head. Apparently as Tan Malaka left for East Java in November 1948, he took the handle with him, leaving the stick itself in Yogyakarta with Hasan Sastraatmadja. The handle was returned sometime in 1949.37 With only a walking stick, a few books, and a rucksack containing a change of clothes and a blanket—something he was careful always to have with him—Tan Malaka cut a simple figure. His habits were similarly spartan. According to Adam Malik, he would rise early and start work by 5:00 A.M. He was disciplined and ordered in his work. His handwriting was tiny, designed to use very little paper, and he used his own acronyms and abbreviations so that no one else could understand what he had written.38
When he was working one could not disturb him. When he finished he was exhausted, and he would ask for satay and black tea or hot water with sugar.39
He had an extraordinary power of attraction. Nonsex, non-alcohol. Like the Indian leaders seeking moksha (liberation) through self-denial.40
This picture of extreme simplicity is given also by people who knew Tan Malaka during the Japanese occupation, when he lived in anonymity in Bayah, West Java, working in the office of a coal mine. In contrast to the other staff, Tan Malaka had no servants, and he did all his own cooking, washing, and cleaning. Not so unusual, he had few clothes, and he wore his somewhat crumpled and patched outfits for several days at a time. He was distinguished by his “uniform”: long socks and shorts, pith helmet, and his walking stick. He is remembered as a strange fellow who kept to himself, never inviting anyone to his house and seldom visiting others; often going off by himself for long walks along the beach or to fish from a certain rock by the river. No coffee and no cigarettes: he would drink only hot water or tea. He bathed only in the evening, sometimes simply wiping his body with a wet towel, as one observer put it, “in the European way.”41
Tan Malaka had not always been so aloof. His classmates in Holland recall him as being quite an extrovert. In school he was somewhat of a wit—joking and telling stories of home, calling himself “Prince of Malaka,” and always at the ready to put on an act, whether behind the teacher’s back or on stage by request. He read everything he could lay his hands on concerning the French and the American revolutions. A classmate recalls that he had a photographic memory and would recite whole sections of his previous night’s reading. This talent was to remain with him throughout his life, as his autobiography reveals. His sporting ability showed itself on the soccer field, where he preferred to play without shoes as he was accustomed to back home, and in the swimming pool where he used his own style and swam “like a water rat.”42 During the 1922 Dutch election campaign, when Tan Malaka was a candidate for the Dutch Communist party, his comrade Henk Sneevliet commented that particular attention was being paid to Tan Malaka by Fenny Struyvenberg, a student in Leiden with whom he stayed during his visit to that city. “She is filled with admiration for the energetic Malay, captured by him,” wrote Sneevliet to his wife.43
A personal note on Tan Malaka’s Moscow experiences comes from J. de Kadt, who also attended the June 1923 plenum and evidently spent a lot of his time in Moscow with Tan Malaka who, De Kadt reports, “here, too, was particularly popular.” They went together to hear Trotsky speak; Tan Malaka had arranged front-row seats. At the last moment Trotsky could not come, so Tan Malaka delivered a short speech in German, which was evidently well received. De Kadt goes on to say as follows:
And then we were able to beat the retreat and drink away our disappointment, for in Tan Malaka’s dreary and messy room in a huge apartment building he had a good stock of Caucasian wine, which I found delicious although a little on the sweet side. His friend, one of the many Comintern secretaries, was a particularly likeable young woman, with an earnest and vocal presence, who was as deeply attached to the cause of the Comintern as to Tan Malaka.44
Music and sport were important to Tan Malaka from his early years. He played in orchestras and on soccer teams in his school days in Bukit Tinggi and through his years at the teachers’ training college in Holland. His long and recurrent illnesses must have limited his capacity for physical exercise from the days when he swam the Ombilin River in West Sumatra, but even in Bayah he devoted time to organizing football teams among the mine workers, and in 1976 there was still a small monument to Tan Malaka on the site of the old playing field His musical interest persisted to the revolutionary period. Paramita Abdurrachman, Tan Malaka’s secretary and Subardjo’s niece, recalled long hours of discussion and enjoyment of music. She was an accomplished pianist. Subardjo played viola, and Tan Malaka in his youth played the cello. Abdurrachman recalled that Tan Malaka would whistle long obscure passages from classical music and that he loved to sit for hours and hear her play. He favored romantic composers, especially Schubert. He used to quote Napoleon to her, saying that music weakens the revolutionary spirit and that she would have to choose one or the other.
Abdurrachman had previously been politically close to Sjahrir. She described to me the differences between the two men and Sjahrir’s disappointment over her shifting allegiances. In personality there was a great gulf between the two men, she recalls: “Sjahrir maintained a balance between work and relaxation, but for Tan Malaka relaxation was a weakness. . . . In Yogya he would get angry whenever I went out to a restaurant, saying one must not forget the suffering of the people.”45
The legacy of his twenty-year exile hung like a shadow over Tan Malaka’s personality. While he retained the ability to make political judgments and to project the way forward, in the latter stage of his life he was hindered by a reluctance to act or to take center stage. He hesitated, held back, waited for confirmation of his views. Time and again he missed the moment for action completely. Suspicion of and lack of confidence in his supporters proved his undoing on more than one occasion. Tan Malaka clearly had a failure of nerve. For fear of being betrayed to the Japanese he withheld his identity, and his hosts, too, withheld their plans for political action from this mysterious man from Bayah who aroused their suspicions.46
Tan Malaka himself points to the tragedy and irony of his separation from the proclamation of independence despite the fact that he was actually staying in the house of Sukarni (one of the activists) in the days leading up to the event: “It appears that the history of the proclamation of 17 August did not permit me to take part physically, but only in a spiritual sense. I deeply regret this. But history pays