When Joseph Conrad wrote Lucky Jim in the early 19th century, readers didn’t have to look at the map to find Surabaya – it was known worldwide as a hub of Asian and international trade.

The Japanese Occupation forces used Surabaya as a major base, which led to the city becoming the true birthplace of the Indonesian Revolution. It was the first free city under Republican rule in October 1945, and the focus, later, of my two histories on the Republic.

When the semi-trailer carrying new RRI transmitters from Jakarta caught up with us in Surabaya, I left my temporary job on the Djawa Pos to go with the Colombo Plan team by ferry across to Bangkalan on Madura. We drove east to our Sumenep guesthouse near the salt port of Kalianget, which had a very popular open-air cinema, the first I had seen in Indonesia. My three nights at the cinema watching films outdoors were by far the most entertaining week on this assignment.

The Madurese people welcomed me, almost embracing me as one of their own as the only European in the audience, coming to share their movies. The “cinema” was in a big park where an old projector was hooked up to a generator, partly buried to reduce the engine noise. Large bamboo poles supported the big, white canvas screen.

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The foreground was a smooth grassed area where about 300 people sat in family groups, with small stoves to heat meals, mattresses for infants to sleep on (the movies were very long) and cushions, thermos flasks, snack packets and cigarettes, sold from trays by busy young vendors who watched the movies as they sold. Tickets were about 2 US cents, with the best places up front taken early.

A small Chinese gentleman from Surabaya owned the projector. He set the films rolling around 7:30 p.m. each evening. All the films were from India, the worst of the worst, so to speak, which featured for no particular reason, very long dance segments that had no obvious connection to the stories.

The films had been shot using actors speaking Hindi and English, with puzzling English subtitles. Sometimes Bahasa Indonesia was added, written by someone battling with the spoken words, so there was a lot of guesswork. The Indian actors spoke in old-style, 1930s Kiplingesque English, using archaic expressions, which flummoxed the translator as well as the audience.

In my first film, a richly adorned elderly prince is sitting on a throne as irrelevant elephants nearby sway back and forth.

His prime minister approaches, saying: “Your Excellency, there is a challenge to your kingdom from the son of the rival you killed on the battlefield’.”

Prince: “What manner of person is this challenger?”

Minister says in English: “A ‘cocky’ young fellow!” which no one in the audience understands.

The subtitle reads: “A young upstart warrior with very large private parts.”

The minister calls the son of the prince’s rival “bumptious,” an archaic expression from the 1930s, a word the translator does not know, so he writes: “The challenger is badly deformed.”

The second night’s movie had long dance scenes in which lovely girls in bright costumes emerged spontaneously from flimsy looking movie-sets, singing in high-pitched voices and twirling for 10 or so minutes. Ever practical, the Madurese used these long, boring sequences to cook snacks, feed children and stretch their legs and chat, until the main story resumed.

The themes were all similar: handsome, impoverished and unfairly wronged young men in love with princesses trapped in metaphoric golden cages, where they languished, forlorn and miserable. Somehow the young heroes would rescue their beloveds from wicked overlords. These young heroes in the first half are clean-shaven, but when saving princesses, they suddenly have black, manly moustaches, like the Javanese folk character Gatotkaca.

Another scene: An old lord in richly bejeweled jacket, a leer in his eye, says in baritone English to a beautiful young lady, her eyes downcast: “You are a lovely songbird, like a princess, a tonic for my poor eyes.”

The English subtitle was: “You are a lovely plump hen. I have sore eyes.”

The films came in two silver canisters. On the last night — I was a regular VIP by then — the Chinese operator played the second half of a film first, so we got the happily-ever-after scene first.

When the second canister was run, several warriors, who had been killed half an hour earlier, sprang back to life. The audience, much displeased, complained loudly and demanded a refund. Too late! The operator had fled the scene, leaving the projector running.

I stayed to see the reverse story in the hope of seeing at least one more confrontation between overlord and princesses. I was well rewarded:

Scene: Beautiful, bejeweled maiden with heavy make-up is complaining in English about losing her love and freedom: “I am betrothed to marry a rich, old prince — my parents insist — but I love a young childhood friend.”

The English subtitle read: “My parents force me to take a bath with a rich man and his young friend.”

The RRI transmitter, by the way, was an immediate success, extending the broadcasting reach to audiences across Madura and nearby smaller islands.

As for the Madurese people, they are fiercely patriotic, make wonderful soldiers and friends, but are formidable enemies if crossed.

One hero, whose courage I have recorded in Student Soldiers (Obor, 2016), was the Madurese schoolteacher Hasanuddin Pasopati, who commanded a 500-strong militia force during the Battle of Surabaya, described in detail by Suhario Padmodiwiryo, his second-in-command during the battle in November 1945. In 1994, Suhario (by then a General) had published, Autobiografi seorang mahasiswa prajurit (Hario Kecik: Autobiography of a Student Soldier), which I translated into English.

***

Frank Palmos was 21 years old when he began his foreign correspondent career in the relatively new Republic of Indonesia in March 1961. To reach the skill and experience level to succeed in his plan to open the first foreign newspaper bureau in Jakarta, he immersed himself in Indonesian society for two years, at universities, towns and villages, and accepting assignments as a translator.

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