Lombard's death a loss to Indonesian studies

Lombard's death a loss to Indonesian studies

By Myra Sidharta

JAKARTA (JP): Most disturbing among all the bad news I
received in January was an e-mail from Paris announcing the death
of Denys Lombard on Jan. 8. This followed e-mails from Denys'
wife, Claudine Salmon, informing me that he was ill, and later
that he was hospitalized.

But I never thought the end would come so soon for him.

I met Denys in 1978 through Claudine, with whom I shared a
common interest in literature written in Malay by ethnic Chinese
in Indonesia. She was then preparing her Literature in Malay by
the Chinese in Indonesia, now regarded as the definitive book on
the literature, writers and publishers of the ethnic Chinese,
mainly of the pre-World War II period.

Denys and Claudine shared a profoundness in their writings and
they developed the same systematical approach to their work.

They met in Paris, where she specialized in Chinese law at the
Sorbonne, and he studied history.

She took up the study of Chinese, a necessity for her work,
and he also learned that language in addition to Malay, Tagalog
and Thai. They married and became one of the most ideal husband-
and-wife teams in their research on Southeast Asian communities.

Denys' parents were also a team in the study of history. His
father, Maurice Lombard, professor at the Ecole Pratique des
Hautes Etudes, wrote numerous publications about Islamic
civilizations on the north coast of Africa and during the Middle
Ages.

His mother, Anne Lombard-Jourdan, concentrated her studies on
Paris and, as a distinguished octogenarian, continues to publish
her research findings.

In the most recent issue of Archipel, a scientific journal
devoted to Southeast Asian studies, she published two articles,
one on Augustin de Beaulieu, a Frenchman who visited Aceh during
the reign of Iskandar Muda in the 17th century.

The second, written together with Denys, was on Pierre
Bertelot, who died as a martyr in Aceh in 1638. A plaque
commemorates him in the church of St Catherine de Honfleur in
Calvados.

One of Denys' first academic writings, translated from the
French, was The Sultanate of Aceh During the Time of Iskandar
Muda 1967. Publishing house Balai Pustaka translated it into
Indonesian.

In the work, he describes the presence of the French in Aceh
in the early part of the 17th century and provides an excellent
assessment of the splendor of the area during that time.

From 1966 to 1969, Denys was stationed in Jakarta as a
representative of the French School of the Far East, replacing
the late Charles-Louis Damais.

It was no easy task for Denys to take over from Damais, who
had resided here since before World War II and was probably the
greatest expert on old Javanese epigraphs.

Yet Denys documented many aspects of life in Indonesia during
his stay, materials which he would later use to write essays and
more detailed works on the country.

He urged Claudine to do her research on Chinese-Indonesians
because he feared their culture might disappear through
integration and modernization.

She began to study the literature of this cultural group and,
with Denys, wrote The Chinese of Jakarta: Temples and Communal
Life, first printed in 1977 and subsequently reprinted three
years later.

This work has been published in a shortened form in Indonesian
as Klenteng-Klenteng Masyarakat Tionghoa di Jakarta by Cipta Loka
Caraka in 1985.

Almost all the capital's temples are thoroughly described,
including their history and epigraphic objects.

Back in Paris in 1969, Denys taught social sciences in the
School of Higher Studies. In 1971, he was one of the founders of
Archipel.

We can follow most of the scope of Denys' interests in issues
of this publication. He participated in the special editions
about Islam in Indonesia, the New Order, movies, women and the
cities of the country, such as Surabaya and Ujungpandang.

Other contributions, including those about old manuscripts and
martial arts masters in Central Java, were mostly written from
notes made during his stay. His amazing capacity to absorb
everything that he had seen, heard and read made him appear like
a walking encyclopedia of information.

I had the opportunity to get to know him well on several
occasions when the couple stayed with me in Jakarta. He spun
tales about an object or event like an old-fashioned storyteller.

His knowledge was such that he never failed to date an object
before him.

I watched him and Claudine work together in Belitung, a small
island in South Sumatra known for tin mining.

They were interested in Belitung's Chinese community. One of
our first activities was to visit a graveyard, where they wrote
down important data on the first captain of the Chinese residents
and his family.

But Denys was also interested in smaller graves, like single
plots by the roadside or one on the slope of a fort. He amazed me
further by identifying a painting in a commemorative book of the
Belitung Tin Company as a work of Raden Saleh!

I last met him in February last year when he came here for the
launching of his book Nusa Jawa: Silang Budaya (1996), a
translation of Le Carrefour Javanais (The Javanese Crossroads
1992) a three-volume, 1,000-page work on the history of Java.

With 2,500 footnotes and a 63-page bibliography, it was hailed
by A. Teeuw, a noted Dutch professor on Indonesia, as a
"historical encyclopedia on the socioculture of Java in the
context of Asia and the world".

In short, it is the history of Java and its international
network. Teeuw compared it to such classics on Indonesia as
Thomas Raffles' History of Java, Pigeaud's Negarakartagama, and
Kuntjaraningrat's The Javanese Culture.

Denys had to return to Paris the same evening of the
launching. Since 1995, he had taken on additional workload as the
director of the School of Higher Studies, which required frequent
travel to different branches of the institution in Tokyo, Hong
Kong, Kuala Lumpur and many other cities in Southeast Asia.

Denys' death is not merely felt in the passing of a friend,
but particularly in the loss to the science of history, and in
particular for Indonesian studies. Most of all, his passing will
be felt by Claudine, who has lost a good husband, mentor and
partner in their important research.