F

ive years ago, in 2010, I wrote in The Jakarta Post that celebrating Kartini'€™s Day was no longer relevant. This perspective remains critical now for two reasons.

First, it should be Women'€™s Day instead of Kartini Day (her birthday), and second, since her main voice was for emancipation '€” both for women from patriarchy and for the Javanese at large to get education and national autonomy from the firm control of the Dutch '€” the celebration of Kartini or Women'€™s Day should not be celebrated in a narrow sense and conventionally à la the New Order regime'€™s images and ideologies of femininity under the umbrella of Dharma Wanita (organization of civil servant wives) or women'€™s duty.

However, the archive of her correspondence remains significant and relevant today. Her letters, which have been translated into many languages '€” French, Russian, English, Indonesian, Javanese, Sundanese and Japanese '€” enable each generation of readers around the world to gain an interest in Indonesian women'€™s and colonial history.

So far, there are two primary published sources for Kartini'€™s correspondence '€” Door Duisternis tot licht: Gedachten over en voor het Javaanse Volk (Through darkness to light: Thoughts about and for the Javanese people), first published in 1911, and Kartini: Brieven (Kartini: Letters), published in 1987.

The English version of Door Duisternis tot licht (first edition 1920) excluded 29 of the original letters. The Indonesian version, Habis Gelap Terbitlah Terang, omitted 21 letters from the original letter extracts contained in Door Duisternis tot licht. Recent Indonesian versions also lie between the two records in which both volumes had reduced the amount of letters available to their respective readers and continued to exist as two separate collections of Kartini'€™s writings with two different agendas.

Reading this correspondence together as a single corpus of writing will allow us to better understand the historical, political, sociocultural and intellectual context. Based on this idea, a complete collection of Kartini'€™s writing was recently published by Joost Cote, entitled Kartini: The Complete Writing 1898-1904 and published by Monash University Publishing in 2015.

This new book, which consists of 869 pages, collects every surviving item of writing by Kartini and recalls her work for today'€™s reference. It is the first time all known writing by Kartini has been assembled, some of it for the first time after 110 years. This volume reproduces 141 complete and partial letters and includes 11 pieces of extended writing, which were either published or circulated among small groups of readers during her lifetime.

Divided into six sections, this book reveals Kartini as an emerging writer, not just '€œwriting letters'€ but capable of writing in a range of genres. This includes the 141 letters, four published short stories, two modern ethnographic articles that give rich insights into the lives of the Javanese, two official memoranda written at the behest of and directed to Dutch and colonial officials, three pieces of prose from her private collection and the list of the contents of her library, revealing the breadth of the modern publications '€” fiction and non fiction'€” she had been reading.

The introduction of this book analyzes the historical context in which Kartini was writing, to show at least three matters.

First, she clearly expresses a protonationalist discourse, both in terms of choice of language '€” e.g. ons volk (our people) or natie (nation) '€” and in terms of defining a clear cultural nationalist discourse. Her writing matches and in many ways is more important than the writing of contemporary male nationalists such as Abdul Rivai or Tirto Adhi Soerjo and precedes that of Soewardi Soerjaningrat, well known as Ki Hajar Dewantara.

There is little evidence of '€œnationalist consciousness'€ at this period in Indonesian history. To this end, therefore, Kartini'€™s writing is important as a source of documentation for the history of Indonesian nationalism.

Second, she deliberately developed through correspondence strategic connections with key representatives of many sociopolitical and progressive Dutch organizations, such as socialist democratic and progressive liberal, feminist, progressive Christian or humanitarian groups and directly with the colonial and Dutch metropolitan governments at that time in an attempt to influence Dutch and colonial attitudes toward their colonial subjects.

Third, Kartini addressed and appropriated key themes of progressive Dutch discourse as a means of participating in and influencing contemporary progressive debate with regard to colonialism. This is evident in relation to her harsh criticism of colonial rule as well as her plans and initial work for improvements to education, public health, traditional arts and the economic welfare of her people and society.

To this end, many of us agree that there are many events of the past that are handed down only by word of mouth from one generation to the next and that there are very few documents '€” particularly documents written by women '€” from this period anywhere in the world that provide such a clear and personal perspective on the times and world they lived in.

Kartini'€™s writing provides historical records as in literate societies. How many of us are aware that through her correspondence, Kartini in fact educated Europeans about their colonial subjects and that they were equal? Who knows Kartini'€™s influence on the enforcement of Dutch ethical policy?

It can be argued that only when we go through all of her writing, the range of her writing, do we get a clearer idea of what Kartini represented '€” how important she was not only in the history of Indonesian women'€™s rights activism and modern writers but also the early expression of cultural nationalism.
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The writer is a social and cultural anthropologist who teaches at the Graduate School of Cultural Studies, Sanata Dharma University, and performing and visual arts studies at Gadjah Mada University, both in Yogyakarta.