THE OTHER INDIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 140, 27 February 1942, Page 6

THE OTHER INDIA

Written for "The Listener’

by

A.M.

R.

"The East Indies have remained right up to now very much on the tavilight edges of our consciousness, a world of their own within a world not interested in them"

E call it "The Dutch East Indies." Its few nationally conscious natives insist on "Indonesia." Far Eastern merchants abbreviate to "D.E.I." But the Dutch say simply "India" (they spell it Indie) and casually dismiss the Brightest Jewel in the British Crown as merely "British India" or "Hither India." And they are not altogether wrong. "The Hon. John Co." or British East India Company, whose private servants it was who brought India (our India) into the British orbit, was originally founded to exploit these islands, and only turned to the continental Hindustan as "the leavings" when it could not push its way past Dutch cannon into "the pickings," Island Ind itself. It is we who are mistaken-we who vaguely picture the Dutch Indies as a group of jungly islands inhabited by crocodiles, snakes, and "wild men of Borneo" (confused half with Orang Outans-" Wild Men of the woods" — and half with naked Papuans. with bones through nose and ears). Maps Are Misleading For actually here is an island world jn itself-a Milky Way of archipelago beyond archipelago, as long west to east as from Ireland to India, and wide north to south as from Norway to Africa. (It is our habit of studying world geography on Mercator Projection maps that misleads us as to its extent.) And while

most of the thousands of islands are, naturally, small-in many cases being mere cricket ovals of blinding white coral-sand set in cool white rings of foam-some of them are enormous. Borneo aspires with Nieu Guinea ("Neeoo Hchinaya" the Dutch pronounce it) to be the largest island in the world. And Sumatra is not far behind. Then while, indeed, there are men in their woods who wander in droves with hardly more tools or habitations than the tigers and rhinoceroses -around them, there is also, in one jungle, a monument that was thought to be a hill until it was cleared. Larger than any pyramid except the Great Pyramid, it is a far greater human feat than any of them. For it is terraced on a complicated plan with hundreds of. monks’ cells and stone statues and is inscribed with two miles of elaborate bas-reliefs. Moreover the civilisation that wrought it is not dead. Never publicised in the schools of the West, as, for example, the extinct civilisations of the Aztecs and Incas have been, it lives on to-day in Java more ancient and hardly less distinctive. And on Bali alongside you may walk into the

India into which the Buddha was born six hundred years before Christ. In The Twilight The East Indies, in short, have remained right up to now very much on the twilight edges of our consciousness, a world of their own within a world not interested in them. Their contact with Europe has been practically confined to pumping a continuous stream of tropical products (including dividends) out to dinner tables and factories and Dutch pockets, and to accepting in return, often with surly bad grace, a super-efficient administration and occasional spoil-sport gunboats nosing into inter-island piracy. And they have held a world of variety within their own se‘!-sufficiency. I remember at the Batavia University picking out the races among the students. They graduated in type eastwards from stocky, independent, intellectual Orang Batak of the Sumatran Highlands, whose cannibal grandfathers beat the world’s chess champions, to natives of what the Dutch call "The Greater East," whose features approximated to loose, irregular Australian "Abo" and black, frizzy,

loose-lipped Papuan. — between, in geographical situation, re the smooth quiet brown faces, the straight glossy heads, the slight ankles and tiny graceful hands of delicate dreaming Orang Java, perhaps the most beautiful race in the world. The social conditions those students variously. came from were yet more diverse. What had the Buginese, steering their home-made prahus by the stars and their own pre-European books of navigation, in commuu with natives of, their own interior whose "conversion" to Islam had consisted in acquiring the formula " God is Allah: and Mohammed is his wife?" What had little Java, ancient in civilisation and to-day a hive of agriculture and population, in common with its three big neighbours of almost non-existent interior population and culture, among each of whose mountains it could be lost twice over? A "Touring Company" What unity the Indies have, indeed, consists in their geographical contiguity and common experience of domination. This first became real to me in a gathering very different from that University one. With some friends from India — British India-I was in a tiny village deep in the Bantam countryside. We were sitting with the villagers under a great banyan inthe almost cool dusk watching a "Touring Company" begin the night’s entertainment-yes, literally, the whole night’s. They consisted of a two-man brass-wood-and-bamboo orchestra with as many weapons as a jazz band, a one-man chorus who was also stage-manager "and scene-shifting staff, and about twenty wayangs. These, the actors, in gorgeous flowing robes and jewel-studded weapons, stood waiting their cues in a line on either side of the stage, a soft banana log into which they were plugged by the spike with which each was shod. Their fierce aristocratic features under tall complicated headdresses "registered" various set " stylized " emotions, and their long wire-thin crooked bare arms gesticulated expressively, when, plucked up as their turns came and plonked, quivering, "centre stage" by the "chorus" squatting in "right foreground," they were unobtrusively manipulated by vegetable " wires" attached to their wrists. Apart from these occasional violent exits and entrances no "action" seemed to occur beyond gesticulation, more gesticulation and even more gesticulation to the continuous sing-song declamation of the chorus. Nevertheless my Indian friends were enormously excited. For they recognised the long noses, pale faces, and exotic magnificence of those wayangs, all so completely un-Javanese, as direct out (Continued on next page)

THE OTHER INDIA (Continued from previous page)

of their own great Aryan Epics, the Ramay.... and Mahabarata. Back Through History History ran backwards for us to the plaintive jangling of the gamelan. We saw the" Aryan, "noble," invaders of India, perhaps fifty centuries ago. We saw so-distant Java colonised-how remains largely mystery. We saw Buddhism arrive; and remembered the Japanese poet Kagawa, a speck lost in darkness on the immensity of the Baraboedoer; and as we brooded on all that lost endeavour, and wondered if it had any cosmic meaning, suddenly the light flashed on us that it was the quiet-cour-ageous living of Buddhist saints and missionaries that had tamed savage man in the East, as Christian living had in the West, in preparation for the Universal Reign of God in all human spirits, and over all human institutions. We saw sixty generations of similar peasants, knee-deep in the slush of their rice terraces; the identical stories we were watching played identically, with, only slight intentional refinements or fallings away with the passage of the centuries; princes rising and falling according to the only two possible dénouements to the one theme of intrigue and violence; taxes flowing in endlessly; the earth never failing in her two crops yearly and her stage settings of riotous colourtwelve hundred years! Except to the disgraced courtier, the merchant under the thumbscrews of a rapacious ruler, the mystic pondering man’s creatureliness, God-hungry heart, and self-insufficiency,

or the peasant homeless and starving by war, flood, plague, typhoon, volcanic devastation, it must have seemed a fairly satisfying-the only conceivableexistence, and destined to continue in the endless cycles predicated in Javanese philosophy. And Now? Then suddenly the fanatical mission-ary-trader- pirate Moslem burst the rhythm of life. And close at his heels strode red-haired green-eyed, long-nosed and long-shanked pink Demons from Utmost West, demanding tribute of spices. (You will hardly recognise the Portuguese, -w the darkest of Euro-peans-largely because of their Malay and Negro mixture. But it is so we of Europe appear to the Far Eastern pecples). Then it.e Poriuguese in turn were violently superseded by even more outlandish, taller, paler, more ruthless conquerors. They left a legend, a tradeway, hundreds of words in the Malay lingua franca (which the Dutch and British housewives ordering in it never suspect). And they left the Dutch-the Dutch solidly settled, in. the beaver hats and black broadcloth of their own misty flats, strange, unexpected, unemotional heirs to the whole heritage of dashing Portuguese, ardent Arab, flaming rajah, saffron saint, dawn-of-history Aryan adventurer, and blazing colourful provi-dent-improvident Nature. Bloody wars were fought. Harsh capitulations were signed. The whole sun-soaked island of Java became one huge estate toiling for distant shareholders in cold stone cities under a bleak northern sky. The other islands, undeveloped, still jungle-clad, stood by waiting their turn. But now?