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Bitter past for better tomorrow
The 400-plus year history between Indonesia and the Netherlands has not always been sweet
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The 400-plus year history between Indonesia and the Netherlands has not always been sweet.
The Indonesian people have a deep emotional bond with the Netherlands and vice versa.
In 1595, the Dutch fleet sailed to Banten in West Java in search for spices, a highly valued commodity during that time, taking the route used by Portuguese ships.
The Dutch East India Company or Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) was established in 1602 to manage the commercial trade in Asia.
The arrival of the VOC in Banten marked the beginning of a long period of colonization over Indonesia and, as is the case with colonization, things were mostly bad for the colonized people.
A 175-page book titled Bitter Spice: Indonesia and the Netherlands From 1600, launched at the National Gallery in Jakarta recently, chronicles the complex relationship between the two countries.
On canvas: Painter Nicolaas Pieneman, who had built a considerable reputation in the Netherlands as a painter of historical pieces, was commissioned by General De Kock (probably in 1830s) to record the arrest of Prince Diponegoro on canvas.
“I gave the book the title Bitter Spice because it is a book about a history that had a lot of bitter parts,” the writer of the book, Netherlands-based Rijksmuseum historian and curator Harm Stevens, told The Jakarta Post.
“Sometimes it is a beautiful history, but there were a lot of tragedies in the history shared by the Netherlands and Indonesia.”
In the book, Stevens shares stories of Indonesian artifacts and relics from the Dutch-colonial era, curated for Rijksmuseum, as are stories and pictures on the dress code for residents and assistant residents, set up by Leonard Pierre Joseph Viscount du Bus de Gisignies, who was appointed the highest authority in the Dutch East Indies in 1826.
While the book is written from a Dutch perspective, Stevens hopes it will be fuel for other historians to voice their opinions about the history between Indonesia and the Netherlands. In doing so, the public will get new layers of information.
Black and white: The caption of an old photograph says only “the fortifications of Kute Reh” (in Gayo) without describing what could actually be seen in the photograph. It is believed to be the often-used technical jargon of fort construction.
“There were a lot of communities of Dutch people who once lived in Indonesia and returned to the Netherlands after colonization. The people have begun to pass away and the connection [between Indonesia and the Netherlands] has become less emotional. That is why it is important to cherish these objects [written in the book]. They can be used as some sort of source to the past history,” he said.
The book may have significant impact on today’s generation of Indonesians in terms of how they relate the colonial context, during the Dutch colonization era, to what Indonesia has done as a state after the independence.
There were a lot of killings carried out by the Dutch, whether as a private company in the form of the VOC or as a monarch state, towards indigenous Indonesians during the colonial era. The atrocities that the Dutch committed against the Indonesian people may be worth comparing to the post-independence era.
Trace of history: President Sukarno and his family enjoying their garden at home in Yogyakarta (left) as seen in the February 1950 issue of illustrated American magazine Life. The issue ran a 14-page photo series by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson titled “The New Nation of Indonesia”.
Peter Carey, a historian from Trinity College in Oxford, England, who specializes in Indonesian history said young Indonesians could use the book to open their eyes about the complex history of the colonial past in context with the modern story of Indonesia as both a state and a nation.
While the colonial past was generally bad, there were some things in Indonesian society that worsened following independence, Carey said.
“We have seen a loss of heterogeneity [in post-colonial Indonesia],” Carey said.
“You used to have a Jewish community, you had a totok [pure] Dutch community, you had left wing thinkers and so much of these have been lost in post-independence Indonesia. So many people have not been able to make their homes here.”
— Photos Courtesy of Bitter Spice
