Stamford Raffles' place in the history of Java

By Onghokham

JAKARTA (JP): On Nov. 22, 1995, on the occasion of Indonesia's 50th independence anniversary, the British government presented to Indonesia a collection of 1,500 drawings, watercolors and sketches made by order of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles and collected by him during his tenure as lieutenant governor of Java during the governorship of Lord Minto.

Raffles' tenure lasted for five years, from 1811 to 1816. His interest in Java, however, dated much further back, as did his interests for the entire Malay world. Raffles' own two-volume work, the History of Java (1817), is still the definitive Javanese history. He might have followed it up with a History of Sumatra, with material he collected while governor of Bengkulu, but, unfortunately, the ship containing the Sumatra material sank.

While in Bengkulu, Raffles lost three children, and good friends like Dr. Horsfield, to malaria fever. In Java, his first wife, lady Olivia Raffles, might also have contracted the same fever. A memorial to her still stands in the Bogor Botanic Garden.

Raffles was probably one of the most intelligent governors of Java, if not the most intelligent European leader to come to this part of the world. He was a typical Enlightenment intellectual: extremely liberal, void of prejudice, a strong belief in science, and a great curiosity in everything. His close friends included Javanese such as Abdullah bin Abdulkadir Munsji, the renowned writer of the Sejarah Melayu, a Javanese Grandee Ronodipuro.

The most prominent of Raffles' Indonesian friends was Sultan Notokusumo I of Sumenep, Madura, who reputedly was one of the best scholars of Old Javanese and other old languages. The Sultan of Sumenep was said to be a main source for the History of Java, as must have been Ronodipuro. In any case, Sultan Notokusumo was the first, and for a long time to come, last native member of the Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences which was housed in the present-day National Museum, or Gedung Gajah, on Jl. Merdeka Barat in Central Jakarta).

The Sultan's grave, the Astana Tinggi, which is situated outside Sumenep in Madura, looks similar to the Taj Mahal. It bears that romantic British Oriental architectural style which found its fullest expression in Kuala Lumpur's railway station and several other colonial office buildings of Malaysia's capital. On a modest scale, the Astana Tinggi of Sumenep is probably the only British colonial building in Indonesia.

Raffles' influence on the Madurese sultan is evident in the prince's ideas, too. The prince abolished slavery in his palace and principality in the 1810s. Slavery was not officially abolished in the Netherlands Indies until 1863, probably an influence of the outcome of the American civil war.

The Raffles period, or English interregnum as Dutch historiographers call the period from 1811 to 1816, fostered a whole group of brilliant scholars besides Raffles. They were assembled by Raffles, or became close to him because of his intellectual mind and interests. Among them were Dr. Horsfield, John Leiden, a polyglot who, as an assistant to Lord Minto, encouraged him to support Raffles, William Marsden, who wrote the History of Sumatra, and another brilliant British official of the English East India Company, John Crawfurd, who was resident in Yogyakarta. John Crawfurd wrote about the east-Indian archipelago and was probably the first one to see it as a unit. His works are still useful to scholars. There were others, including several Dutch officials of the former government, like Engelhardt and Muntinghe, who did not object to serving the new colonial government.

The English East India Company's policy was to retain Dutch personnel as long as they were loyal to the new colonial overlords. European politics where the basis of the policy.

The British conquest of Java, and its policies, had its roots in the European situation of the time. In Raffles' time, the emperor Napoleon made Holland a satellite and then an annexed part of the French empire. The British were the only European power, which opposed French revolutionary and Napoleonic domination of the European continent. Britain, a naval power, could not defeat Napoleon on land and hence its policy was to conquer first the French colonies and then its allies, satellites and annexations -- like Spain and Holland.

The conquests of Java and other islands of the archipelago was part of this scheme. In England, refugee stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, Prince William V, who was also ex-officio director of the Dutch East India Company, announced a proclamation in Kew enjoining the Dutch in overseas colonies to put themselves under British protection or serve them when taken over by the British.

The East India Company used the proclamation to persuade Dutch colonists not to oppose British rule. It even justified their cooperation with the British.

Then, at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 (the end of the Napoleonic wars), the former Dutch colonies such as Java, the Moluccas and Malacca were given back to the Netherlands -- against Raffles' objections. His History of Java, published in 1817, was therefore as much a political piece as a scholarly one. It blackened the Dutch and tried to persuade the English court of the importance of Java.

Most dynamic

The short five year interval under Raffles was probably one of the most dynamic periods in Java's cultural history. Raffles and his circle of scholarly friends were true products of the Enlightenment. They were very curious about the world and the universe, which they studied rationally rather than theologically, as had been done until then. In Europe, the study of the world rather than heaven started during the Renaissance (1453 to the fall of Byzantium) but found its full legitimation in the second half of the 18th century. This resulted in a revival and the strengthening of the Batavian Society for Arts and Sciences, the founding of the Botanic Garden of Bogor, and the discovery by the English of th ruins of ancient Hindu- Buddhist temples like Borobudur, Prambanan and Candi Sewu in Java. Raffles' interest in these pre-Islamic monuments could be seen from the many sketches and drawings he ordered made of them, which are now in the National Library of Indonesia.

Raffles did not only give to Java, but took some of it back home with him. Raffle's and his friends' collections of art objects, ranging from wayang kulit (leather puppets) and gamelan instruments, are now spread among a country house, the India Office and the British Museum.

These art pieces are very important to Java's cultural history because their ages are certain. Javanese and Southeast Asian methods of dating art works mainly depends on styles, whether it concerns temples, kris, or even Chinese porcelain jars.

Raffles gives us a picture of pre-colonial Java at around 1810. Colonialism in Java really did not start until the end of the Java War in 1830, with the reduction of the once mighty Mataram monarchy to the area of the four Central Javanese kratons (royal compounds), and the start of the Cultivation System in 1830.

Some 20 years ago a historian on the Raffles period in Java, Prof. John Bastin, told me of the existence in the cellars of the India Office of this interesting collection of sketches and watercolors brought by Raffles from his governorship. Prof. Bastin has written a foreword to the excellent booklet by A.T. Gallop, Early Views of Indonesia. The few examples exhibited at the National Library, which is the present repository of the collection, and the few reproduced in A.T. Gallop's book, are only the tip of the iceberg.

Raffles was also the first European governor to impose a land tax on Java instead of the Dutch system of forced deliveries of export products. Before imposing the land tax, a great deal of research went into rural relationships and landownership. All of this is very valuable material for the historian. It was research for the colonial plantation system which would transform "old, merry and warring" Java into its present-day structure of a frozen ideological framework of adat (customary) law.

Raffles is best remembered not for his History of Java, or his services to culture, but as the founder of Singapore in January, 1819, and the founder of what later became the Raffles College, the first European school in this part of the world.

Raffles' founding of Singapore was seen by the Dutch as almost a hostile act, and indeed Raffles' tenure in Bengkulu between 1817 and 1824 left the Dutch feeling that the British were encroaching on their Indies. This trauma probably caused the Dutch to expand their territory at a furious pace during the second half of the 19th century, when the great European powers, the U.S. and Japan were grabbing colonies wherever possible. Hence, Raffles might have unwittingly helped shape the present territorial map of Indonesia.