Afro-Asia's Intellectuals-III Indonesia: Sense and Sensibility:

...as popular political leaders arise who lack this disability and who base their mass appeal on a much more nativistic variety of nationalism, the suspicion, ill-concealed envy and outright hostility to cosmopolitan rationalism of the sort Sutan Sjahrir represents swells...

...and for theirs, the intellectuals looked upon '"politicians" with ill-concealed disdain as corrupt, incompetent and provincial opportunists...

...Having narrowly escaped military arrest on Java, he is now Finance Minister of the rebel government...

...His paper is defunct...

...Not only mass politics but mass education has caught up with the prewar intelligentsia...

...And against the 700 colonial-period undergraduates, there are now more than 25.000...

...Mohammed Natsir—A former Prime Minister, he is chairman of Masjumi, the more modern of Indonesia's two Moslem parties...

...What was communicated in the vernacular press, over the radio, or in the numberless mass meetings was of course mainly Japanese, not nationalist, propaganda, and the Government kept a close rein on the activity of Sukarno and his colleagues...

...In the first place, they were a very small group, even for a colonialized country...

...or for a Sukarno, whose oratorical genius, distaste for rationalism and deep, almost mystical, feeling for traditional Javanese culture have always been his outstanding characteristics, the choice was clear...

...In America, for example, an intellectual with no popular following whatsoever can often bring his ideas to bear on policy through expert service to one or another branch of the Government bureaucracy, through providing needed analytic or research skills to key party officials, or through off-stage activity in independent voluntary organizations from Americans for Democratic Action to the National Association of Manufacturers...

...Mochtar Lubis—Indonesia's foremost and outspoken journalist, and editor of what was once its most independent newspaper, he has been under house arrest in Jakarta for over two years on charges still to be specified...

...Let the dogs bark, our caravan will go passing by...

...But in 11 years as Vice President, Hatta never once used his position to gain a large personal following in the way Sukarno used his almost every waking hour...

...Their cry in attacking the Sjahrir-Natsir group as "running dogs of Colonialism" was the shrillest, their exaltation of "indigenous" (i.e., pre-Moslem) Javanese culture the most intense and their call for an authoritarian government under Sukarno the most insistent...

...For a while, a tenuous modus vivendi was maintained between these two diverging wings of the nationalist movement, But after a certain point—which the Australian political scientist, Herbert Fieth, has placed about the time of the fall of the Wilopo cabinet in mid-1953, —a last stand alliance of the intellectual wings of the major non-Communist political parties took place against the snowballing power of the radical nationalists, and the breech between the two wings became nearly absolute...

...In the second place, there was but little nationalistic ferment in the peasantry and effective mechanisms for communicating with the villagers were virtually nonexistent, so that no single member of the intelligentsia could appeal over the heads of the others to the sentiments, prejudices and aspirations of the masses...

...For the moment, the momentum of intelligentsia nationalism carried it forward, even in the suddenly altered context of mass politics...

...With the single exception of the "Islamic Union" (Sarekat Islam), which soon foundered, no genuine mass movement arose before the '40s, and nationalism remained both intellectually elevated and organizationally undeveloped, But, with the Japanese occupation, there was a radical change, for the Japanese deliberately created an Indonesian mass movement for the purpose of policical control and at its head placed Sukarno, Hatta, Hadjar Dewantoro and H. Mas Mansur, who was the former chairman of the intelligentsia-based Islamic reform association, Mohammadijah...

...An unindoctrinated mass, no matter how docile, is an uninfluenceable one...

...Nationalism at this period was less concerned with forging an organizational weapon and more with developing a comprehensive ideological framework which could justify and give content to the struggle for freedom from Dutch domination...

...Organized into a series of small study clubs, discussion circles and the like which, continually harassed by the Dutch, formed, dissolved and reformed with a bewildering rapidity, the intelligentsia, no matter how bitterly split on specific issues, was able to maintain overall unity...

...Let the imperialists abroad be in an uproar...

...So far, opposed by a part of the Army and distrusted for their presumed ties to Peking, they have not achieved formal governmental power at the cabinet level, though several fellow travelers have been appointed to ministries, and many local governments, particularly in East Java, are firmly in their hands...

...Sumitro Djojohadikusumo—Several times Finance Minister, former dean of the economics faculty of the University of Jakarta, he is probably Indonesia's best-trained (in Rotterdam) economist and one of its most astringent critics...

...Though probably typical of all the new nations in some degree, this whole process has gone very much further in Indonesia than elsewhere...

...And, particularly toward the end of the war, when the Japanese saw the handwriting on the wall, the nationalists were given a freer hand to preach their own doctrines, so that by June 1, 1945, Sukarno, his rapport with the masses securely established, felt strong enough to deliver his famous Panch Shila speech in which he set down the basic philosophical foundations for a completely independent Indonesian state...

...The University of Indonesia in Jakarta has grown to five times its prewar size, and several new universities have appeared in various cities of the archipelago...

...And the failure of Sjahrir and the brilliant young men around him even to try to create a radical mass party— which would give Java's totally discontented coolie some place else to go but the Communist party to hear outraged criticism and believable sounds of hope—is perhaps the most disappointing single development in all of post-revolutionary politics...

...As the immediate pressures of the revolution receded, and the techniques of mass agitation came to occupy a more and more central role in Indonesian political life, it became increasingly possible both for individual intellectuals to adopt a plebian, anti-intellectual, anti-cosmopolitan pose, and to appeal for support directly to the masses rather than to their peers...

...Sukarno now proclaims...

...Whatever they turn out to be, however, insofar as they wish to influence their country's destiny, they face the same problem that their now-discredited predecessors faced and failed to solve: In as amorphous and transitional a political system as Indonesia's, the "natural" role of an intellectual as an acknowledged expert, informed observer and respected critic does not exist...

...Thus, for the first time, an effective, modern communication network between the nationalist elite and the peasant mass was forged...

...Will they lack the severity of alienation from their own cultural traditions which hampered so many of their predecessors and still escape a constricting parochialism...

...Kahin, the foremost historian of the Indonesian revolution, has pointed out, in 1920 there were 50.000 college students in India, two in Indonesia...

...The intellectuals were forced to talk mainly to each other even when they were in total disagreement on nearly everything but the goal of independence itself...

...and the Sukarno-led party was intended as the main agency to render the Indonesian masses influenceable...

...Wilopo—Lawyer, former Prime Minister of Indonesia's most effective post-revolutionary cabinet, former chairman of the since-dissolved Constitutional Assembly and one-time leader of the intellectual wing of the Nationalist party, he seems largely to have disappeared from political life, probably into private business...

...And so in the same way that pathology has a peculiar usefulness in understanding normal functioning in medicine, the Indonesian situation sheds light on the dynamics of intellectual life, even in those underdeveloped countries where this strain has been less intense and the relation between intelligentsia and political elite has remained—to date—more viable...

...For their part, the Communists, recovering with increasing rapidity during this period from their debacle in the 1948 Madiun rebellion, when several of their most prominent older leaders were killed, consistently supported the radical nationalists to the hilt, evidently on the general theory that "after Sukarno we come...

...But the techniques of mass agitation and organization were firmly introduced into the Indonesian context, and both elite and peasantry became habituated to their use...

...For a Sjahrir, who as early as 1935 had declared himself spiritually closer to Europe or America than to Barabodur, the Mahabarata or '"the primitive Islamic culture of Java and Sumatra...

...Tjipto Mangunkusumo...

...As George McT...

...The displacement of nearly all cosmopolitan intellectuals from positions of power and influence over the last 10 years or so, and a shift from a simple dislike to an intense hatred for them by the nationalist political elite, is one of the more striking, more poignant and more frightening features of the increasingly rapid disintegration of Indonesian national life...

...Sukarno and Hatta became President and Vice President, and in the three crucial Republican cabinets—from Sjahrir's third, founded in late 1946, just prior to the Linggadjati agreement in which the Dutch first recognized republican authority on Java and Sumatra, to Hatta's first, which was dissolved when sovereignty was actually transferred at the end of 1949 —nearly 60 per cent of the ministers held advanced academic degrees, and most of those who did not were, like Sjahrir, Agus Salim, Natsir or the Sultan of Jogjakarta, intellectuals by anyone's definition...

...Rather, it is whether or not the new, younger intellectuals now appearing will be able to re-establish such a position in the years immediately ahead...

...for others it was less so, But in any case, the tension between the radical nationalists, whether reconverted intellectuals or spontaneous popular leaders on the one hand, and the intellectuals as such on the other, grew very rapidly...

...And when the country's first general elections in 1955 revealed the almost total absence of mass support for Sjahrir's Socialists, who had formed the nucleus of this alliance, their fate was sealed, a fact which Hatta's resignation as Vice President the following year only underscored, By the time of the outbreak of the ill-planned and desperate Padang rebellion in 1958...

...Sjafruddin Prawiranegara—One of the nation's leading economists, former Finance Minister and Governor of the National Bank, he fled Jakarta in fear of his life in January 1958 to become, eventually, Prime Minister of the insurrectionist government in Padang...

...Today he lives in Jakarta, bitter and withdrawn, largely without influence upon the regime...

...For their part, the radical nationalists saw the intellectuals as "colonialist" traitors to the revolutionary tradition, which they interpreted in increasingly nativist terms...

...the businessman and journalist...

...Afro-Asia's Intellectuals—III INDONESIA: SENSE AND SENSIBILITY By Clifford Geertz IN 1936 SUTAN SJAHRIR, Indonesia's most renowned intellectual, wrote from the island in the Banda Sea where he was waiting out the third of his eight years of Dutch imprisonment: "For my relative unpopularity in nationalistic and intellectual circles in Indonesia, I can largely thank what they call my 'Western inclinations,' and sometimes even my 'Hollandaphile' sentiment...

...In Indonesia, lacking a professionally highly insulated civil service, even minimally well-organized party structures or any independent political action groups of importance, the intellectual has virtually no direct way to bring his influence qua intellectual to bear at all...

...Broadly cultured or narrowly technical...

...And...

...As a result, in its earliest phases the nationalist movement consisted of a few outstanding, relatively well-educated older leaders—the physicians, Dr...

...The Sultan of Jogjakarta, possessed by simple right of inheritance of some of the most powerful traditional symbols of political legitimacy in the country, has never made the slightest attempt to capitalize on them outside of his own immediate locality...

...THIS PATTERN PERSISTED up to the war...

...IN SUCH A fashion, the post-revolutionary period has seen an increasingly radical divorce between political sense and sensibility within the Indonesian elite, between those who have thrown their lot in with the increasingly rapid drift to a passionate "let the dogs bark" nationalism, and those who have clung to the prewar tradition of a slightly supercilious, Western-educated, world-culture-oriented intelligentsia as the responsible trustee for the inchoate aspirations of the undeveloped masses...

...Since his fall he has confined himself to meliorative reconstruction work in his small home region in Central Java and to the promotion of tourism...

...He resigned from the last position three years ago in dismay over the disintegration of Indonesian political life...

...Hamengku Buwono IX—Dutch-educated Sultan of Jogjakarta and revolutionary hero, he fell from power as Defense Minister in 1953 after making the most serious effort to rationalize and professionalize the sprawling, uncoordinated Indonesian Army yet attempted...

...Vigorous and idealistic or cynically disillusioned...

...In any case, the essential question today is not how the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia can recover its lost position at the center of the nationalist movement, for such an eventuality seems, especially since Padang, very remote...

...Nearly alone of this group, Natsir made a serious, back-breaking and, despite his rather reserved and owlish personality, not wholly unsuccessful attempt to gain personal commitment from the peasantry, and for a while his popularity carried this whole group...

...Foreign grants have been made to various faculties...

...As in most of the new nations, pre-independence nationalism was almost wholly an affair of intellectuals...

...A Reinhold Niebuhr-like combination of reform theologian and socialist political thinker, he fled Jakarta and joined the Padang rebellion...

...A simple roll call of but a few of the more prominent outcasts gives the melancholy picture: • Mohammed Hatta—Dutch-trained economist and political scientist, and one of the leading figures of prewar Indonesian nationalism, he was "father" of the Indonesian cooperative movement, co-signer (with Sukarno) of the Indonesian Declaration of Independence, and first Vice President of the Republic...

...But about this "new intellectual class" one can, as yet, only ask questions, not answer them...

...Tjokroaminoto, etc.—each with his small coterie of ideologically heterogeneous young men sitting at his feet...

...More and more, each intellectual was obliged to decide whether he was going to adapt himself to the new populism or whether he was going to maintain his stance as an at least ostensibly detached thinker and man of the world, exercising his main influence as a formulator, analyst and critic of Government policy...

...The intellectuals who had spent three decades chiefly talking to one another or writing their rather premature memoirs in a prison camp now found themselves with widespread and enthusiastic support...

...He does not have the option that, say, an American college professor has of being "in" mass politics but not "of" them: He has to be all the way in the political scene or all the way out...

...But in the post-revolutionary period this momentum was lost...

...Modeling their role on that of Western intellectuals, especially in Holland, England and France, Indonesian intellectuals have developed a crippling disinclination for the sort of I-am-the-way demagogy essential to success as a political leader in contemporary Indonesia...

...the disaffection of the intellectuals was so great that most of them either joined it outright as Sjafruddin, Sumitro and Natsir did, or were clearly very sympathetic to it, and the charges of the regime—now more and more focused around the personality of Sukarno—that all these critical of it were foreign-inspired traitors became public and explicit...

...In the days of the heightened solidarity of the revolution and just after, the disintegrative strains implicit in this situation were fairly effectively contained, and the still-small intelligentsia managed to remain a close-knit and dominant group...

...To an extent this disenfranchisement of cosmopolitan intellectuals is a phenomenon very widespread in underdeveloped countries—one thinks of the fate of Kofi Busia in Ghana or Pridi Panomyong in Thailand— because the Western type of higher education of which such intellectuals are products tends to isolate them from the beliefs and values of the mass of people around them...

...Nationalism thus emerged from the three-year occupation period as a genuine mass movement, reaching down to the lowest levels of village society, at least on the major islands...

...This is that, given universal suffrage, a very poorly organized governmental structure, a near absence of nonparty special-interest pressure groups and an ideologically extremely agitated peasantry, the typical role of the politically involved intellectual in the Western democracies is simply not available to his Indonesian counterpart...

...The very basis upon which their status rests inevitably gives them a much greater feeling of alienation from the main stream of indigenous cultural life than we ever experience—the chronic complaints of ''anti-intellectual-ism" characteristic of our own intelligentsia notwithstanding...

...American instructors are being provided, under International Cooperation Administration contracts, by the University of California in medicine and economics, and by the University of Kentucky in various technical subjects...

...The fourth and fifth articles of this series—on Burma and India—will appear in succeeding issues, the former by New York University Professor Frank Trager, and the latter one by University of Chicago Professor Edward Shils...

...An attempt to assess the causes of this split in detail would involve an analysis of the entire range of social problems which have plagued the Indonesian Republic since its founding...

...then, the complete isolation of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia from political power began...

...In classic totalitarian fashion, the Japanese wanted not merely the resigned acquiescence to foreign rule that colonialism asks, but— particularly on Java—active and explicit ideological commitment to the regime...

...Over the past 10 years, the number of Indonesians studying for advanced degrees, both abroad and at home, has increased tremendously...

...Even as late as 1940 the Dutch were offering a college education to less than 700 people, while in the Philippines, with one-quarter the population, there were more than 12.000 undergraduates...

...but in addition to such more deeply lying factors, there is at least one aspect of the situation which is a direct reflex of the role of the intellectual as such in new nations like Indonesia...

...We will march on...

...This simple fact has apparently, not fully been understood, or, if understood, not directly faced by the overwhelming majority of the most balanced and responsible Indonesian intellectuals...

...And as political and economic discontent spreads, the rhetoric or radical nationalism and Communism become virtually indistinguishable...

...Today, after having served his country as Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and United Nations Representative during the most crucial days of its struggle for independence, Sjahrir sits isolated and impotent in Jakarta, virtually forgotten by the mass of the people, a victim of the attitude he so painfully perceived a quarter of a century ago...

...For example, in 1915, there were gathered around Tjokroaminoto in Surabaya not only Sukarno, but the later Communist party secretaries, Alimin and Muso, the later bitterly anti-Communist Moslem leaders, H. Agus Salim and Abdul Muis, as well as the Eurasian multiracial nationalist, Douwes Dekker, the Dutch Communist agent, Hendrik Sneevliet, and the moderate, culture-conscious Javanese educational reformer, Ki Hadjar Dewantoro...

...It has been, ironically enough, the wish of men such as these to cast themselves in the specialized role of the semi-political Western intellectual, a role which does not exist in their society, that has made it possible for the radical nationalists virtually to destroy them as an effective political force, And the jibe made against Hatta that he would make an excellent Prime Minister of Denmark is unfair only in that it is far from applicable to him alone...

...Bahder Djohan—Physician and former President of the University of Djakarta during its period of greatest expansion, he resigned from his post in 1958 in protest against the policies of the Jakarta regime and is now evidently in private practice...

...He has contributed to many learned journals, such as the American Anthropologist and the Journal of Comparative Studies in History and Society, as well as to more general ones like the Antioch Review and THE NEW LEADER...

...In its headlong approach to what President Sukarno has called "the abyss of annihilation," Indonesia has managed not only to disorganize her economy and immobilize her government, but also systematically and thoroughly to divest itself of many of its best trained, most sophisticated and subtlest minds...

...The author, Clifford Geertz, a graduate of Antioch College and a Harvard Ph.D, is now Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California and will shortly take up the same position at the University of Chicago...

...Will they be genuinely educated men or merely degree holders...

...It also became possible for leaders with less education but with the necessary charismatic qualities to arise as important new men of power...

...Sutomo and Dr...

...The third of a series on the role and nature of the intellectuals in the emerging countries of Asia and Africa, this article on Indonesia is the result of almost four years of field work in Indonesia, both in Java and in Bali...