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.