Kayam: A remarkable personality

Kayam: A remarkable personality

Ignas Kleden, Sociologist, Center for East Indonesian Affairs, Jakarta

The name Umar Kayam among Indonesian social science students
has long become not simply a name but rather a notion. He was
known as an Indonesian sociologist of the second generation along
with Dr. Mely G. Tan and the late Prof. Harsja Bachtiar, after
Prof. Selo Soemardjan and Prof. Sayogyo paved the way.

However, Kayam was not only known within academic circles. His
personal whereabouts as well as his professional engagement went
far beyond lecture halls and research centers. Just after his
return from Cornell University where he obtained his Ph.D., he
embarked upon cultural rather than academic activities, and he
was intensively involved in writing short stories, which later
became an inspiration to future generations of short-story
writers.

To these literary hopefuls, Kayam appeared as no less than a
maestro.

From 1966 to 1969 he worked as Director General of Radio, TV
and Film at the Ministry of Information, during which time he
introduced some important reforms pertaining to marketable and
quality films.

He chaired the Jakarta Arts Council from 1969 to 1972,
introducing his controversial view that art and culture can and
should undergo the process of democratization.

He was not reluctant to assume the role as an actor in a film
about the end of Sukarno's regime. His role as Sukarno in this
film was so widely known that people in the street who did not
know him as Umar Kayam, knew him instead as Sukarno. This is the
reason why Kayam was so popular among Indonesian people of art
and literature. He was well accepted not only as one of them, but
also as one with a distinguished position.

After his term at the Jakarta Art Council, Kayam was back to
his first role, social sciences, and served as director of the
social science research training center at the University of
Hasanuddin in Ujungpandang from 1975-1976. This was one of four
centers run by the Social Science Foundation chaired at that time
by Prof. Selo Soemardjan, and supported by almost all senior
social scientists in Jakarta and Bogor in the mid-seventies and
early eighties.

His home base for teaching activities was the University of
Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, where he served for some time from
1977 as director of the center for the study of Indonesian
cultures. He was a guest lecturer at the University of Indonesia,
Jakarta, and the Driyarkara School of Philosophy, Jakarta.

The peculiar and unique contribution of Kayam in cultural and
artistic as well as in social science matters is that he, with
strong conviction, tried to break through the unnecessarily
petrified compartmentalization with regard to traditional or
modern art, or with regard to disciplinary and academic division
of labor.

Kayam was not very politically minded. His research works as
well as his academic and journalistic publications deal mostly
with cultural and social problems rather than with political
changes proper. His practical political engagement was being a
member of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), which
apparently did not impress him very much.

As a short story writer and novelist, Kayam turned out to be
politically conscious. His most productive years coincided with
the aftermath of the September 1965 coup. This partly explained
why he seemed unable to entirely get rid of the bitter
experiences of those years. Among the Indonesian people of
literature who belong to the established literary canon, Kayam
was the first to address the political destiny affecting those
who were supposed to be members of or at least were associated in
one way or another with the Indonesian Communist Party.

His long short-story Bawuk in the mid seventies and his novel
Para Priyayi in the early nineties describe those who are
supposed to be leftist as persons who try to go up the social
ladder without, however, following the traditional Javanese
patterns of social mobility. According to the traditional
patterns of the Javanese, social mobility means the change of
status within the patron-client framework. The patrons are the
nobility and clients are small peasants. The exchange within this
framework is fairly obvious. The clients are to supply
agricultural produce in exchange for cultural refinement and
political protection provided by their patrons. However, a
peasant has the possibility to change his or her status by
becoming a little priyayi (aristocrat) because a person coming
from a peasant family can become a member of an aristocratic
family though he or she is treated as belonging to a lower status
in the beginning before he or she is eventually treated as equal
in the aristocratic family.

In Kayam's description, one can make oneself accepted among
the priyayis by means of learning their etiquette, their language
and their way of doing things, and by joining them during their
leisure time. Persons who are supposed to be leftist in Kayam's
short story and novel are people who purposely discard this
pattern of social mobility and try to rely on their own efforts
and initiatives. However, these efforts end up in failure and
they finally become non-existent.

Kayam sympathized with the underdogs who were marginalized by
their own society, but his literary imagination seemed to still
forcefully inhibit him to find another way out outside the
traditional patterns of social mobility. Those who are
progressive become finally the right person, but in the wrong
place, or the wrong person in the right place.

Writing about Umar Kayam, I cannot help saying something about
his personality as a typical product of a culture he comes from.
He was a Javanese by all criteria, and belonged, during his life
time, to the social class of Javanese aristocrats. Accordingly,
he showed a great sense of noblesse oblige. Kayam consciously
assumed his role as a modern patron. A non-Javanese such as
myself, would have difficulties in understanding why and how this
role was so well played in his life. The patron-client
relationship with his juniors was so obvious though the dominant
position of the patron was in many cases successfully mitigated
by sincere friendship. I happen to know some very talented and
well-known poets of Javanese origin, who possibly exceed Kayam's
literary reputation, who nevertheless showed great respect to
him. The same can be said of younger social scientists, who
possibly are more serious than Kayam was in their social science
engagement, and who nevertheless look up to Kayam all the time.

This might become part of the explanation as to why Kayam as a
personality exceeded by far his own achievements, because seen
against his cultural background, human greatness is not so much a
result of doing as a part of being.