Stamford Raffles' place in the history of Java

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.