The Indonesian Embassy's Cultural Life of Indonesia (Excerpts) (1951)

In 1951, the Indonesian Embassy in Washington, DC, published a booklet titled The Cultural Life of Indonesia: Religion, the Arts, Education. Published six years after Indonesia's declaration of independence and only two years after its recognition as a sovereign nation, the booklet is a revealing example of the way the Republic of Indonesia, through what was one of its most geostrategically important embassies, was narrating itself and its culture internationally. It includes accounts regarding Indonesian history and literature that provide a window into the mid-twentieth-century Indonesia — and in particular its literary scene — that Wright visited when he attended the Bandung Conference.

The booklet's foreword was written by Ali Sastroamidjojo, who in 1951 was Indonesia's ambassador to the United States and one of his country's most prominent nationalist politicians. A Javanese aristocrat educated in the Netherlands in the 1920s and a member of the Indonesian delegation at the Round Table Conference in The Hague that negotiated the terms of Indonesian independence in late 1949, Ali was a leading figure in President Soekarno's Indonesian National Party. In July 1953 he became Indonesia's eighth prime minister, presiding over the first of two multiparty cabinets that played a significant role in the country's experiment with parliamentary democracy between 1950 and 1957. Importantly, he was also the original proposer of the Bandung Conference, having suggested the convening of a high-level conference of the independent states of Asia and Africa to the then prime ministers of India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and Burma at a meeting in Colombo in April–May 1954 (Feith, Decline 387). In 1955, at the time of Wright's visit, Ali was prime minister of Indonesia as well as chair of the conference he had proposed only one year earlier. So when Wright met Ali while in Indonesia in 1955, he was meeting someone who not only represented Indonesia on the world stage but was also a man whose career epitomized the rise of the Indonesian nation from a colonial state to a country at the forefront of nonaligned political philosophy in a world divided by the Cold War.

In its "Language and Literature" section, the Embassy's information booklet offers an account of the emergence of modern Indonesian literature that is heavily determined by the official narrative of Indonesian nationalism. In the decades since the publication of this booklet, scholarship on Indonesian literary history has come to see the origins of "modern" literary expression (i.e., modern expression via the indigenous languages of the Dutch East Indies) in the hybridized works of early twentieth-century Sino-Malay and Indo-European writers, and has identified some of the earliest creative expression by indigenous Indonesians as emerging from within the Communist movement that was silenced by the Dutch in the 1920s. In the Embassy's 1950s narrative, however, there is no suggestion of cultural hybridity or political radicalism in the conditions that gave birth to the transition out of older forms of literary expression in the language that came to be called Indonesian, or "Bahasa Indonesia." Instead, the history of modern Indonesian literature presented in The Cultural Life of Indonesia begins with the 1933 founding of the literary and cultural periodical Poedjangga Baroe (spelled Pudjangga Baru by the time of the booklet's printing, and Pujangga Baru after 1972). In this way, the booklet defines modern literature in Indonesian as a product of the moderate cultural nationalism that emerged among Dutch-educated and ethnically "pure" Indonesian nationalist youth from the late 1920s. This was a strand of modern literary expression made up of poetry and prose that grew out of a romantic nationalism combined with verse forms and narrative styles adapted from the examples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European literature that these young writers had come to know primarily through the colonial education system.

From this point, the Embassy's account moves directly to the work of a group of modernist authors who emerged in Dutch-occupied Jakarta during the years of national revolution. Impatient with the prewar generation's romanticism and provincialism, this new group of writers transformed the Indonesian language through a spare realism in prose and symbolist experiments in poetry. They also formulated the concept of "universal humanism" as an aesthetic and cultural credo. These writers formed the nucleus of the groups who interacted with Wright during his three weeks in and around Jakarta and Bandung.

It is particularly interesting to see in this account of Indonesian literary history the Indonesian Embassy narrating the in-progress emergence of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's career. Pramoedya was later to emerge as one of the most prominent voices in Indonesian literature and the country's best-known author outside Indonesia itself. At the time this booklet was written, he was loosely associated with the universal humanist circle, a twenty-six-year-old Javanese among writers and intellectuals who were mainly Sumatran in ethnic origin, and a contributor to the cultural and literary periodicals this group supported. However, Pramoedya later moved away from his early associations with the universal humanist outlooks and into close alignment with the more radical...