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.