A tour in the Preanger: The tea gentry and their women

A tour in the Preanger: The tea gentry and their women

By Tineke Hellwig

BANDUNG (JP): Fifty-five Dutch tourists conducted tour of West
Java's tea plantations in July, known as the 1995 Tea Tour. For
the larger part, this group of travelers, whose ages ranged from
13 to 80 years old, consisted of descendants of the Heren van de
Thee (tea gentry), as in the title of a Dutch historical novel by
Hella Haasse (1992, serialized in Indonesian in the Kompas daily
between September and December 1993). These people still refer to
West Java as Preanger.

The children of Albertus van der Hucht (1762-1812) and
Caroline van Wijnbergen (1771-1842) first came to the Dutch East
Indies in the 1840s. They and their relatives became heavily
involved in the cultivation of tea, and later kina and rubber, in
West Java.

The 1995 Tea Tour was motivated by an interest in both family
history and modern Indonesia. The family ties of the extended van
der Hucht-Holle-Kerkhoven-Bosscha clan tightened when the novel
Heren van de Thee turned out to be an enormous success. Print
after print of this fascinating piece of fiction found its way
into the Dutch bookstores, and it was widely discussed and
reviewed.

The framework of this trip was to visit a number of tea
plantations, previously owned by the tea gentry: Gunung Mas in
Puncak; Parakan Salak, not far from Sukabumi; Malabar; Gambung
and Negla, in the Pengalengan area; and Cisaruni, close to Garut.
All of the plantations are now under the direction of PT
Perkebunan XI-XII-XIII, the Indonesian state-owned company which
is responsible for tea production and processing.

PT Perkebunan's president, R.G.S. Soeriadanoeningrat, and
Sultoni Arifin, director of the Research Center for Tea and
Cinchona, were the hosts of the tea tourists. They and their
staff presented their Dutch guests with one highlight after
another, leaving them with impressions they will never forget.

The festive dinner program at the Malabar estate was not only
filled with top quality Sundanese performances by Gugum Gembira's
group, Jugala, but even included a concert of the Sari Oneng
gamelan ensemble, which belonged to Adriaan Holle at Parakan
Salak as early as the 1850s. In 1956 the large gong of Sari Oneng
was accidentally shipped to Holland, and was not returned until
1989. Nowadays, the gamelan is an exhibit at Museum Prabu Geusan
Ulun, run by the Pangeran Sumedang foundation. It was a great
honor for the overseas visitors that the gamelan was transported
to Malabar for this occasion.

Parakan Salak was where it all started for the tea gentry. On
July 4, 1844, Willem van der Hucht, thirty-one years old,
obtained from the Indies government the tea contract for Parakan
Salak. One-hundred-and-fifty-one years later, on exactly the same
date, the tea group was warmly welcomed at the same place by
directors and managers of PT Perkebunan XII. They had prepared
fifty-five young damar trees to be planted by the Dutch
participants, each marked with a participant's name.

Unusual event

Among the crowds of villagers who gathered for this unusual
event was an old woman who had been a tea picker for Tuan
(Master) Alex -- Alex Holle -- who died in 1955. A walk through
the remains of the Patamon building brought various memories back
to the three daughters of Marcel Huguenin, for whom this was
their childhood home until 1958. They met with two former family
servants, Pak (Mr.) Mad'sari and Pak Madsa'i. Madsa'i saved the
life of one of the girls in her youth when she almost drowned in
the swimming pool. Although she remembers the accident well, it
was only on this trip that she realized who rescued her.

Somewhere behind the Patamon building members of the first
generation of the van der Hucht are buried: Willem's wife
Jannetje, two of their children, and his brother Jan Pieter. All
four died within two years of their arrival between 1844 and
1846. The beginning was definitely not a smooth and easy one, and
Willem's nephews Holle and Kerkhoven were to continue what he had
started.

While the exact location of the graves at Parakan Salak is
unknown, visits to four other graves made it possible to
commemorate the Dutch ancestors. In Sinagar, Nagrak Utara, Pak
Ujum and his daughter Sarifah take care of the grave of Eduard
Julius Kerkhoven, Willem's nephew.

Eduard Julius, who managed the Sinagar tea estate, was highly
unconventional in his private life. He never officially married,
but that did not mean he lacked female companionship. Rumor has
it that during his life he had several nyais, local women who
served as both his housekeepers and concubines. Only one of them
is known to us by name, the Chinese Goei La Njio, who gave birth
to two daughters and one son. Those three children were
acknowledged by their father and given the Kerkhoven family name.

As Eduard Julius' Dutch relatives considered his sexual
behavior highly inappropriate, they hushed up his marital status
in public. In spite of the stigma attaching to his nyais, the
three mixed-blood children were accepted by unmarried aunts in
Holland for a "proper" Dutch education and in that way were
Europeanized. Eduard Jullius' son Adriaan returned to his native
soil to become a successful and well-respected manager in
Panumbangan.

As Adriaan kept up the taboo and never spoke openly of his
mother Goei La Njio, she remains surrounded by mystery. According
to the official family tree she died in Sinagar in 1871. However,
Hella Haasse suggests in her novel that Goei lived much longer
and left her Dutch master to marry a Chinese man. A direct
descendent on the tea tour confirmed that there was all kinds of
speculation circulating in the family about what happened to his
Chinese great-grandmother after her liaison with Eduard Julius.

As for the other women in Eduard Julius' life, Sarifah told
the tea tourists at the grave that every year people who claim to
be descendants of his illegitimate children still come to visit,
and she showed the group a guest book with addresses in Cibadak,
Sukabumi, Depok and Jakarta. Has the time come, after so many
decades in which the Dutch family felt embarrassed about Eduard
Julius' sexual practices, to pay attention to the forgotten blood
ties with those who stayed behind in Indonesia?

Similar rumors about nyais and illegitimate children
circulate on the Malabar plantation in the Pengalengan area.
Here K.A.R. Bosscha was in charge from 1896 to 1928. Bosscha,
whose name is inextricably linked with the Bosscha Observatory in
Lembang, was also co-founder and chairman of the Technical
University in Bandung, now the Bandung Institute of Technology.
Like Eduard Julius, K.A.R. never had an official spouse, but
several villagers in the area claim to be descendants of the
well-known juragan sepuh (senior master).

Reflecting on those colonial days in the 1990s, one wonders
what made these white men so attractive that women were willing
to live with them as nyais, serving them in all respects, even
bearing them children out of wedlock.

Of course, local feudalistic customs justified the widespread
practice in which men of wealth and high status (sultans,
pangeran) picked beautiful young girls as their gundik (mistress)
to keep them as long as they pleased. And, as the stories go, the
girls' families even felt proud when their daughters or
granddaughters were chosen by a man of power.

The white male colonizers probably looked on the local
aristocrats as their role models. It was comfortable for them to
have a nyai, as it meant all their needs were taken care of.
Unfortunately we do not know what the women went through as they
served men who were culturally and racially different. Maybe they
were not as happy as their masters, being on the lower end of the
power scale.

K.A.R. Bosscha's monumental grave, erected in 1928, is still
in tact. Here too the tea tourists planted fifty-five trees,
rasamalas this time, in a piece of forest that Bosscha wanted to
be preserved.

Main characters

For her novel Hella Haasse chose Rudolf E. Kerkhoven and his
wife Jenny Roosegaarde Bisschop as the main characters, and
therefore Dutch readers know their personalities and inner lives
best of all. At the age of eighteen Rudolf was left in the
Netherlands when the rest of the family settled in the Indies
where his father was to manage the tea and later cinchona estate
of Arja Sari, south of Banjaran. When Rudolf had completed his
university education, he too came to Java in the hope that he and
his father would work together. To his disappointment this
expectation was never realized. After a period of apprenticeship
at Sinagar with his uncle Eduard Julius, Rudolf started his own
estate in Gambung in 1874 which, at the time, consisted of
overgrown neglected coffee shrubs. It was at Gambung that he
raised his family of five children after he had met with and
married Jenny.

Rudolf was passionate about Gambung, about his work,
conquering the jungle, experimenting (successfully) with Assam
tea and turning it into a flourishing business. It probably would
not be too bold to state that Gambung was his first "bride" in
the Indies, and that, during his married life, he maneuvered
himself into a "triangular relationship" with Gambung and Jenny.

Of Jenny we know more than we do about the anonymous women in
the lives of Eduard Julius Kerkhoven and K.A.R. Bosscha. The
picture of her life is not a happy one, however. Jenny was born
and bred in the Indies. As one of the granddaughters of Marshall
Daendels, she believed that a curse rested upon her and her
relatives.

The first few years of married life were peaceful and
harmonious for her and Rudolf, but soon the isolation of the
plantation and the pregnancies which took a toll on her body
turned her into a gloomy person. Her husband's obsession with his
work became a major cause of discontent for Jenny. On her return
from a visit to Europe she became so depressed about living at
Gambung that she took her own life at the age of 49.

Rudolf and Jenny's graves, along with one of the many
governesses who were hired to teach the children, survived the
destruction of World War II. Out of respect for their former tuan
the local people made sure that the graves were not destroyed by
the Japanese.

The marble plaques, however, had been lost over time, and new
ones were affixed in a ceremony led by Marga Kerkhoven, one of
their grandchildren, assisted by Gambung's current director, Dr.
Sultoni Arifin. Marga spoke in both Dutch and Indonesian and
addressed the spirits of her grandparents in Sundanese, a
language her grandfather learned to speak well.

It was a touching moment, the more so because the tea tourists
felt as if they knew Rudolf and Jenny from reading the novel.
And, as Dr. Sultoni conveyed to the group, many Dutch tourists
have made the pilgrimage to their graves over the past couple of
years, out of sheer curiosity after having read the book.
Apparently fiction appeals to the reader's imagination more than
any historical study would.

The last day of the tour saw a visit to the Cisaruni
plantations, previously known as Cikajang, south of Garut. For
the tea clan Garut is closely associated with the figure of K.F.
Holle, who started his career at Cikajang, soon to establish his
own estate, Waspada.

The eldest representative of the second generation, K.F. Holle
had a sincere interest in the Sundanese language and culture and
made many efforts to improve the standard of living of the local
population. He earned the title mitra noe tani, friend of the
farmers. Not all of his Dutch relatives at the time agreed with
his far-reaching concerns for the Indonesian subordinates in whom
he invested much of his energy and money.

The tea tourists came to Garut with a very special request to
the regent, Drs. Toharudin Gani. After K.F. Holle's death in 1896
a monument was erected in the town square. According to eye
witnesses, the three-meter-tall obelisk was buried when the
Japanese invaded to save it from destruction. It should still be
there, under the ground, they told the regent, and the Holle
family members, in particular, would be most grateful if he would
have it unearthed.

Next year will be the 100th anniversary of K.F. Holle's death,
they pointed out. Would it not be timely to have this historical
landmark re-erected, the more so as it may become a tourist
attraction in time?

Overwhelmed

After ten days of traveling the Dutch travelers felt
overwhelmed by the hospitality, generosity and friendliness of
their Indonesian hosts. Every activity on the program had been
taken care of in all detail and had been carried out smoothly and
efficiently. More than once they had asked themselves: Why are we
being treated this way? Why are we welcomed with music and
dances, almost like kings; or like our ancestors, the colonial
rulers?

This year Indonesia celebrates its 50th anniversary of
independence. The signs and decorations along the roads leave no
doubt that this year's Aug. 17 was a date of utmost importance.
How do Indonesians live with their colonial past? What are their
views and feelings towards their former colonizers?

These questions are not easy to answer. Generally speaking,
one does not notice feelings of resentment or rancor toward the
Dutch, but of course there is more than the eye can see, at
different levels and among different people.

As for the Tea Tour, naturally economic interests were also at
work, since it represented 55 tourists from the affluent West who
could afford to pump money into the tourist industry. Moreover,
PT Perkebunan XI-XII-XIII is a modern company which has a product
to sell: tea. Maybe among those 55 Dutch some would become new
customers, promoting Preanger tea in their home country?

The tea gentry does not exist anymore: The colonial past is
long gone, while R.G.S. Soeriadanoeningrat and the PT Perkebunan
directors manage the plantations in a modern, business-like way.
Still, their kindness and hospitality left the Dutch group with
many feelings of affection toward them and towards the country in
which their grandparents and great grandparents worked and lived.

The trees that were planted will, it is hoped, grow tall and
strong, symbolizing an ongoing connection between the past, the
present and the future.