Yogyakarta at the end of the 20th century

By Hartoyo Pratiknyo

JAKARTA (JP): It may be that the character of a place, like its beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Thus, different people are certain to view the ongoing ethno-photographic exhibition at Erasmus Huis, "Social and cultural activities in Yogyakarta at the end of the twentieth century", differently.

The exhibition, which closed yesterday with a seminar, is a laudable effort on the part of the Gajah Mada University's Department of Ethnography in Yogyakarta to present, as the Erasmus Huis's program booklet states, "the current lifestyle of Javanese society, such as is found in markets, in the streets and in the kampong areas," through some 100 photographs.

The pictures on display are the fruit of almost five years of work by the university's ethnographic department, during which facts were documented and hundreds of photographs were taken of people interacting socially.

Since the exhibition is first and foremost an effort to convey those study findings through visual means, those who expect highly artistic photographs will be disappointed. Admittedly there are a number of admirable pictures, but the emphasis is on the message they convey.

Considering Yogya's reputation as a "city of learning", it is not very surprising that the majority of photographs deal with student life in and around the thousands of dormitories that are scattered across this city of half a million people.

Like the swarms of tourists who have over the past couple of decades made Yogyakarta Indonesia's second most visited tourist destination after Bali, the hundreds of thousands of students who have come from all over Indonesia to study in this city have transformed it. In the past four or five decades they have contributed immensely to the city's conversion from an ancient and more-or-less static Javanese city into a vital modern Indonesian one, complete with American fast-food chains, posh hotels, movie theaters, traffic snarls and, of course, the omnipresent student dormitories.

According to the 1990 figures in the study, the city of Yogyakarta proper has 37 universities and academies with a total of more than 50,000 students. Seven state-run and eight private universities with a total of more than 90,000 students are located in the city's surroundings. At least Rp 22 billion (US$11 million) or 7.12 percent of the region's annual budget is transferred by parents to students living in the city each year. The student's expenditures provide a source of income for Yogyakarta's hundreds of thousands of households.

It is this transformation that has made Yogyakarta unrecognizable to a native who has not been to the city for, say, a decade or more. It takes at least a few days and many forays into the more obscure corners to realize that the old pulse of the city's underlying heart continues to beat -- with a somewhat altered rhythm -- with undiminished vitality.

To the casual visitor, Yogyakarta still is and will always be the "cradle of Javanese culture" advertised in the tourist brochures. To the old-timer, however, there is no doubt there is much lost in the Yogyakarta of today. The pace of life has definitely changed.

As Yogya's kampong neighborhoods become more and more crowded the old, cool open yards disappear to make room for new living quarters and, of course, the student dormitories that for many families provide a major source of livelihood. The shouts and laughter of children playing in those yards during moonlit nights are no longer heard. As the open spaces continue to disappear, where is a child to find the crickets to stage cricket fights as in the old days?

Considering the power and span of impact of all this change, it is a pity that the scope of the exhibition does not permit the present to be placed in proper perspective. Because of the dominance of photographs dealing with various aspects of dorm life, the scenes of street and market life and also the handful of more intimate photographs of the remaining vestiges of the old customs and traditions seem like a mere afterthought to round out the exhibition.

Even so, the present undertaking deserves to be commended for its effort to present the existence of this ancient Javanese city as it confronts the challenges of the modern era.