Yogyakarta at the end of the 20th century

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.