Indonesia is not alone in the countries where “history” has been written to conform to notions of the powers that be. At Saint Anthony’s grade school I was taught that God Himself had charted the course of U.S. history. By His guiding hand Christopher Columbus had “discovered” the Americas. Where are the native peoples in this narrative? Because of His will U.S. dominion extended from sea to shining sea. How about the Chinese coolies who laid the rails that united the continent? Even during World War II, which ended with the explosion of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was God, I learned, who gave those bombs to the U.S. Likewise, at Weston High School, students were not encouraged to think or ask questions; we were instructed to memorize proscribed answers.
In college, as a Fine Arts major at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 1970 to 1973, Western Art History was a required subject but it was not until the next year, when I switched schools and majors and enrolled in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that I began to acquire a non-U.S.-centric perspective of world history. Such an awakening this was! And it was there, in 1975, I first met Taufik Abdullah, a scholar and historian who encouraged me to open my eyes to other ways of looking at the world.
Pak Taufik came to Madison that summer of 1975 to teach “History of Modern Indonesia and Malaysia.” I was one of only a dozen students in his class, a number that allowed for greater interaction between teachers and students and because Taufik was not that old himself—still in his thirties—talking to him was more like talking to an older sibling than a lofty professor.
Taufik was the first Muslim scholar I’d ever met and I was curious to know whether he ascribed to a view similar to that of my previous history teachers in respect to the role that God had to play in the trajectory of human history. In conversations with Taufik, I learned that though he was a man of strong religious conviction, he did not allow faith to fight with facts. “Historians are humans,” he told me, “who may or may not believe in God but whose personal beliefs should not blind them to science or facts.”
Teacher and student: Taufik Abdullah and John McGlynn at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1975.
With his ready smile and soft-spoken manner, Taufik appeared to be a human embodiment of the proverbial kancil, that Sumatran deer mouse who uses wiles to outwit the crocodiles who would have him for lunch.
The second Indonesian historian I got to know, also that summer, was Ong Hok Ham. Unlike Taufik, Ong was not a man of strong religious conviction and “faith” was a word he rarely spoke with a positive connotation. Even so, he resembled Taufik in his use of wiles and wit to make his viewpoint known. Because Ong had come to ISSI to speak at a conference and not to teach, I did not get to know him as a student but at the guest house where out-of-state students and teachers boarded, I was the naïve observer to friendly arguments between these two men. That summer, a friendship was forged between us.
After summer school ended, Taufiq and Ong returned to Indonesia and their respective positions at LIPI and the University of Indonesia. I, on the other hand, lived a peripatetic life for the next years to come and it was not until 1983, when I settled down in Jakarta, that I able to see those two historians with any regularity.
The third Indonesian historian I came to know was Nugroho Notosusanto, Indonesia’s Minister of Education from March 1983 until June 1985. Born in 1930, Nugroho was a teenager at the time of the Indonesian revolution but, apparently enamored with the military, after the war, he poured his thoughts on the revolution into fact-based fiction. That is how I knew him: the author of Hujan Kepagian (An Early Morning Rain) and Tiga Kota (Three Cities), two collections of stories about the revolution.
My guess is that it was his talent as a writer and high regard for the military that brought him to the attention of General Abdul Haris Nasution, the Army’s Chief of Staff, who hired Nugroho to write a history of the revolution. The result was a tract amenable to the Indonesian Army, one that served as a counter to the Communist-Party’s history of the time period.
After the overthrow of the Sukarno government by the military in 1965 and the blood bath that followed, Nugroho’s first history text put him in good stead to write the government’s official history of this more recent time of upheaval—which he did, in collaboration with Ismail Saleh. Their 1968 publication, The Coup Attempt of the 30 September Movement in Indonesia, was the first book on the subject to be published in Indonesia and was later used as the basis for the 1984 pro-military film, “The Eradication of the Treachery of the 30 September Movement of the Indonesian Communist Party.” Perhaps because I subtitled the film, Pak Nugroho contacted me in late 1984 and hired me to translate his history of the 30 September Movement, which he was now calling The White Book, a chide to The White Paper put out by Cornell University which cast the Indonesian army in a dimmer light.
The White Book proved to be difficult to translate, not for linguistic reasons but because of the unabashedly biased nature of the text itself, which extolled the heroism of the Indonesian military, demonized all leftists, and offered no other story line except for the one the government’s propaganda machine had been stuffing down people’s throats for almost two decades. Despite my reservations, I finished the job but I don’t think my translation was ever published because in June 1985 Pak Nugroho died from a cerebral hemorrhage.
It was around this time that Ong held a housewarming at his new home in Cipinang Muara and there I reunited with Taufik and Ong. I don’t recall our exact conversation but I can clearly see Ong with a half-full tumbler of Scotch, me with a bottle of beer, and Taufik with a glass of juice as we talked about Pak Nugroho’s recent death and the man’s role and impact as a historian. After I told them about my experience in working on The White Book, Taufik looked at Ong and remarked, “And that is the difference between us! You and I are documentarians, mere scribblers of events. We are nothing compared to our late friend, may his soul rest in peace. That man didn’t just record history, he created history!”
It was at that same moment I saw, in Taufik’s broad smile and the twinkle in his eye, the deer mouse I’d first glimpsed in 1975 and then, too, that the larger truths in the words he’d spoken at that time finally dawned on me: that “history,” having been written by fallible humans, is something always to be questioned and that God is on no one’s side.
John McGlynn
john_mcglynn@lontar.org