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Javanese Cultural Traditions in

Suriname
Pamela Allen

Review of Indonesian and Malay Affairs

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T he Cult ure Change of Surinamese Javanese People (DRAFT )

Eren Irfanoglu

Mulih nDjowo
Pamela Allen

06 - C Choenni-1 (1)
C.E.S. Choenni, Chan Choenni
 Javanese cultural traditions in Suriname1

Pamela Allen

Keywords: Javanese, Suriname, ethnicity, Indonesian cultural maintenance

Abstract: Between 1890 and 1939, around 33,000 Javanese were recruited in
Java and taken to Suriname to work as contract labourers on the sugar plantations.
Many descendants of those contract labourers still live there. Based on interviews
with and observations of Javanese Surinamese in June and July 2009, I examine
cultural maintenance among the Javanese in twenty-first century Suriname, following
and in some cases updating the observations of earlier scholars who have undertaken
research in the field. My analysis is informed by Fredrik Barth’s claim that an
ethnic group and its ‘culture’ do not necessarily share the same boundaries (Barth
1970:38).

Until 1975 a colony of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Suriname is

a tiny nation of less than half a million people, squeezed between
French Guiana (an overseas department of France) and Guyana
(formerly British Guiana), north of its vast neighbour Brazil, but
orientating itself much more to the Caribbean than to South America.
Suriname was multicultural before the term was invented.2 It is worth
heeding, however, Allen Chun’s reminder (1994:135) that ‘most human
societies from time immemorial have been multicultural or multiethnic,
only to be subjected to temporary erasure by the imagined
homogeneity of the nation-state’. Edward Dew (1978:47–8) likens
Suriname society to the abrasa vine, which coils itself around a tree,
gradually choking it, but still needing support for its survival. The
result, he suggests, is ‘a coiled tangle of independent, living forces,
bound together in an interdependent effort to flower and survive.’
The Dutch first arrived in the Caribbean in 1595, in search of
salt. Over the next hundred years they established themselves as a great

Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, vol. 45, nos 1 & 2 (2011), pp. 199–223.
200 Allen
economic world power (Hoefte 1998:8). As they expanded their
enterprise throughout the Caribbean, establishing coffee and sugar
plantations, the Dutch turned to slavery to find workers. The Dutch
West India Company, formed in 1621 and modelled after the United
East India Company (which was founded in 1602 to protect Dutch
trade in the Indian Ocean), played an important role in the slave trade.
While it had been explored by the Spaniards in the sixteenth
century, Suriname was first colonised in the mid-seventeenth century
by the English, who established tobacco and sugar plantations there.
One outcome of the Anglo-Dutch Wars between 1665 and 1674 was
the transfer of sovereignty of Suriname to the Dutch in exchange for
New Amsterdam (New York). Although the first governor, Van
Aerssen Van Sommelsdijck, negotiated peace with the indigenous
Amerindians (Suparlan 1995:25), over the next twenty years or so they
were driven into the interior. The Amerindians currently comprise only
2 per cent of the population of Suriname.
The Dutch imported over 300,000 African slaves to work a
plantation economy based at that time on sugar, coffee and cotton;
tobacco had become unprofitable soon after the Dutch took control of
Suriname. (Hoefte 1998:11). During French attacks on Suriname in
1689 and 1712 many slaves escaped to the jungles where they joined
earlier colonies of escapees and established an Afro-American culture
with socio-political systems based on those of their original West
African homelands. These escaped slaves became known as Bush
Negroes, nowadays called Maroons (Suparlan 1995:28). They used the
jungles as a base for guerrilla war, with the first slave rebellion
occurring in 1730. In 1778 the Maroons made peace with the
plantation owners and the autonomy of the Maroons was guaranteed
as long as they accepted the supremacy of the government (Suparlan
1995:29). After slavery was abolished in 1863 the Maroons continued
to live in their own communities and to distinguish themselves from
the former slaves, the Creoles. The tribe and village continue to remain
important to them. Some of those living in the villages receive salaries
and recognition from the government because of their roles within the
tribal governments.3 Currently the Maroons comprise 14.7 per cent of
the population of Suriname.4
Javanese cultural traditions in Suriname 201
The Creoles, in Suriname defined as mixed descendants of
West African slaves (or ex-slaves) and Europeans (mostly Dutch),
comprise 17.7 per cent of the population. An important aspect of
being Creole is the claim to having been born in Suriname. Suparlan
(1995:30) reported that, to the Creoles, Hindustanis (a term still in
common use) and Javanese are ‘immigrants’.
Over 40 per cent of the population of Suriname are
descendants of British Indian and Javanese contract labourers.
Currently the largest ethnic group, comprising 27.4 per cent of the
population, are the Hindustanis. Also referred to as East Indians, these
are the descendants of emigrants (mostly indentured labourers) from
northern India in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The
Javanese are the fourth largest ethnic group with 14.6 per cent of the
population. The Chinese comprise a further 2 per cent of the
population, the Amerindians 2 per cent, and there are small
communities of Koreans, Japanese and Filipinos. Estimates of the
number of Brazilians in Suriname vary between 20,000 and 80,000, a
fluctuation in part due to the movement back and forth across the
border by Brazilians prospecting for gold in Suriname.5 In addition,
one can encounter in Suriname people with Portuguese, Spanish,
Jewish, Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese heritage or, in many cases, a
mix of two or more. The Burus (derived from boer, the Dutch word for
farmer) are descendants of Dutch nineteenth-century immigrant
farmers, many of whom left Suriname after independence in 1975.
In twenty-first-century Suriname, this cultural pluralism is
accompanied by a remarkably high level of ethnic and religious
harmony. The mosque and the Jewish temple are neighbours, with the
Catholic cathedral just down the road. Hoetink (1972:23) attributes the
social cooperation in Suriname to the presence of ‘such a large
segment that is culturally, somatically, and in social organization,
different from the old “Creole” population’, which helps to mitigate
former colour and class differentiation. De Bruijne and Schalkwijk
(2005:267) suggest it is due to ‘long-lasting exposure to each other and
to each other’s culture ... living together as neighbours and maintaining
daily interaction.’ One of my respondents was adamant that the ethnic
harmony evident in Suriname is precisely because of, not in spite of,
202 Allen
the large number of ethnic groups that comprise the population.
Indeed, an ethnic hierarchy of some kind seems almost inevitable in an
ethnically plural society. As Suparlan points out (1995:26–8), the social
dynamics of the plantation colony led to social classes and categories
converging with racial and colour categorisation. Prior to the abolition
of slavery the Creoles (Afro-Surinamese) could move up the social
ladder depending on the lightness of their skin. Neither the blacks nor
the whites were homogeneous categories. The blacks, who could be
Creoles or Maroons, were divided into free blacks and slaves. The
whites were divided into classes that reflected class and family
background in Europe as well as economic and political position in
Suriname. Negative attitudes towards the black and Creole populations
did not end with the abolition of slavery. The European view of
themselves as ‘culturally and intellectually superior’ (Hoefte 1998a:104),
as well as the prevailing ‘scientific’ literature on race, helped to
determine the racial hierarchy of Suriname. While, however, Hoefte
(1998a:94) reports that ‘the Europeans preferred Javanese to British
Indians’ and ‘the Asians as a group were better liked than the Afro-
Surinamese or Creoles’ in the early days, the Javanese were looked
down on in particular by the Creoles, who described them as lau-lau
Japanesi (‘stupid Javanese’) and made comments to them like Kan, sang
joe sabi joe kong dja nanga karta joe neckie (‘Man, you don’t know anything;
you came here with a card around your neck.’) ((van der Kroef
1951:674–5). In the case of some of Parsudi Suparlan’s informants,
this led to a degree of conformity to Creole culture, largely for self-
preservation: ‘The Creoles are rough. If we treat them with politeness,
as we treat other Javanese, and with ngalah (yielding) behaviour to
whatever they are doing to us, they tread on us. We have to respond to
them in their ways of treating us.’ (Suparlan 1995:109)
De Bruijne and Schalkwijk (2005:251) discuss the ways in
which ethnicity in Suriname is marked in the private domain by
participation in celebrations such as weddings, funerals and birthdays.
Furthermore, they point out that ethnic cohesion is preserved by the
preference across all ethnic groups for endogamy. Paul Tjon Sie Fat
(2004:3) focuses on the public manifestations of ethnicity in his
discussion of the importance of ‘politics of recognition’, that is, the
Javanese cultural traditions in Suriname 203
requirement for an ethnic group to be able to demonstrate certain
‘markers’ (an original homeland, an ethnic language, folklore, histories,
cuisine and costume) in order to be considered part of the narrative of
‘racial utopia’ in Suriname. His paper focuses on the construction and
development of ‘Hakkaness’ in Suriname, which is shaped by similar
forces as those I discuss in this paper in relation to ‘Javaneseness’.
History of the Javanese in Suriname
In the brief historical overview that follows I draw from the work of a
number of key scholars in the field. In his early sociological study
Justus van der Kroef (1951:679) concluded that the social needs and
educational demands of the Javanese in Surinam ‘may well force a
continuous political crisis in the life of this Guiana country’. Yusuf
Ismael’s pioneering 1955 study ‘Indonesia’ Pada Pantai Lautan Atlantik
provides a valuable overview of the history, demographics, social life
and religious practices of the Javanese in Suriname at the time. This
paved the way for later anthropological studies by Annemarie de Waal
Malefijt (1963, 1964) and Parsudi Suparlan (1995). Craig Lockard
(1971) addresses the social and economic background to emigration in
a study that includes Javanese emigration to New Caledonia and Malaya
as well as Suriname. In her worldwide survey of involuntary labour,
Wilhemina Kloosterboer (1960) includes a detailed discussion of the
operations of the recruiting agents in Java, an issue also covered by
Rosemarijn Hoefte in her 1998 study In Place of Slavery, which is a social
history of Indian and Javanese labourers in Suriname.
With the abolition of slavery in 1863, more than 33,000 slaves
in Suriname were granted their freedom; very few of them chose to
remain on the plantations. (Lockard 1971:46) Most became small rural
landholders; others moved to the city. The planters then proceeded to
import indentured workers from British India to supply the plantations
with cheap labour. They were employed on five-year contracts, with
penal sanctions giving employers the right to press criminal charges
against those who broke their labour contracts. British Indian
immigrants remained foreign nationals, giving rise to the possibility
that a considerable proportion of the population of Suriname would
soon be British subjects, who would be able to appeal to the British
204 Allen
consul against the decisions of the highest Dutch authority. Further
concerns related to the reliance on a single foreign country for labour
and to the growing nationalist movement in India, which attacked the
system of contract migration.
Java was considered an alternative source of labour; those who
had observed Javanese workers on the plantations in the East Indies
described them as ‘very satisfactory’. (Ismael 1955:29) Initially, attempts
to import people from Java failed because the Dutch government did
not permit the migration of Javanese when there was the possibility of
acquiring labour in India. The movement to recruit Javanese gained
strength in the 1880s due to the changing political climate in India. This
brought with it the advantage that the Dutch themselves would be in
control of the recruitment and immigration process and would not have
to compete with other recruiting nations. But the Dutch colonial
minister objected to emigration from Java by arguing that the Javanese
were not disposed to migrate to remote and unknown Suriname. After
lobbying from Surinamese planters and officials, however, the
government eventually decided to allow a trial with one hundred
Javanese contract migrants in 1890, despite doubts about the physical
strength of the new labourers. According to records in the Stichting
Surinaams Museum, the majority of the early migrants came from the
densely populated areas of central West Java, but there were also some
from Surabaya and Semarang (Hoefte 1998a:221). Lockard (1971:48)
reports that the main recruiting centre was Semarang.
Almost 33,000 Javanese migrated to Suriname between 1890
and 1939. Rosemarijn Hoefte’s account (1998a:51–5) of the
recruitment process details the failure of attempts to establish an
emigration department in Batavia. While a recruitment ordinance,
establishing recruitment regulations, was issued in 1909, the
recruitment, contracting and transportation of the indentured
labourers were left in the hands of private entrepreneurs. These private
agencies required a government licence, which was renewable annually.
By 1914 a record of ‘decency’ was required in order for licences to be
renewed. By the end of World War I only one recruiting agency for
Suriname remained, the Algemeen Delisch Emigratie Kantoor
(ADEK), which had offices in Batavia, Semarang and Surabaya.
Javanese cultural traditions in Suriname 205
Because the recruiting agents were paid per migrant, and
because there was a bonus if more than twenty migrants were
delivered, the recruitment process inevitably led to corruption, and ‘all
forms of deceit and trickery were resorted to’ (Kloosterboer 1960:34).
As a result, recruiters (werak) had a notorious reputation; a recruiter
could be recognised, reportedly, by ‘his dog-whip, banknotes, secretive
actions, and exaggerated amicability with officials’ (Meijer Ranneft
cited Hoefte 1998a:222). The recruiters developed a number of ploys
to entice potential recruits, one of which was to force them into
indebtedness through gambling. Another was to ensnare women with
the promise of marriage. Parsudi Suparlan includes in his book
(1995:253–7) a first-hand account of an impoverished illiterate 13-year-
old girl, who was lured from the market in a village near Malang in East
Java with the promise of a well-paid job as a maid in Malang. Far from
ending in Malang, her destination was in fact Suriname, a gruelling
voyage that went via Surabaya, Batavia and ‘other places’ (presumably
including Amsterdam), and on which she and her fellow passengers
endured verbal and physical abuse. Both Hoefte (1998a:52) and de
Waal Malefijt (1963:29) report accounts of Javanese believing that
magic and bewitchment had been used to get them to Suriname; a view
that continues to be reiterated by contemporary Javanese in Suriname.
Kloosterboer (1960:34) concludes that ‘there was absolutely no
question of voluntariness on the part of the coolies.’
Upon arrival in Suriname the recruits were assigned to plantations,
which were required to provide them with free housing. The quality of the
housing, however, was often inadequate and most indentureds claimed that
the wages were significantly lower than they had been promised
(Kloosterboer 1960:35). They also had to cope with adjusting to a new life,
diet, and work regime in an often hostile environment, compounded by
homesickness. Language, too, was an isolating problem. Few Javanese
spoke Sranan Tongo, the lingua franca of Suriname, few spoke Dutch, and
none of the other ethnic groups could speak Javanese.
Despite the poor conditions under which they lived in
Suriname, only 20 to 25 per cent of those Javanese migrants returned to
Java before World War II; the majority settled permanently in Suriname.
The reasons were not necessarily positive. Many felt that they would
206 Allen
return to Java poorer than they had arrived; others feared ridicule and
shame if they arrived back in Java with nothing to show for their time in
Suriname. Some feared the boat trip. Most, therefore, remained in
Suriname out of ‘bitter necessity’ (van der Kroef, 1951:674).
The next wave of Javanese immigrants to Suriname comprised
free settlers. Several thousand arrived between 1930 and 1940, to live
near and work on the plantations, or to participate in small-scale
agriculture. Others, like WC ‘Bob’ Menajan, now 87 years old, came to
work in the bauxite mines owned by Billiton, the same company that in
1860 had taken over the tin mining on the Indonesian island of Belitung,
using imported Chinese as well as local labour (Termorshuizen
2008:289), and from where Indonesian labourers would later be taken by
the company to Suriname.6 In 1941 at the age of nineteen, Bob left his
birthplace of Sukabumi in West Java for the long sea voyage to Suriname,
via the Panama Canal and New York, leaving behind his parents, whom
he would never see again. Unlike most of the other Javanese arriving in
Suriname, Bob spoke no Javanese. He could speak only Dutch and ‘a
little’ Malay (a modest evaluation, to judge by the mastery of the
language he demonstrated in my interview with him). On arrival in
Suriname he learnt Sranan Tongo. Bob has made one return visit to
Indonesia, in 1960, but, while he liked the people, he found the place too
crowded and busy. He does not know whether he still has relatives in
Sukabumi or other parts of Indonesia; none of his three children and
two grandchildren have expressed any interest in visiting Indonesia and
none of them speak Javanese. But Bob can play the gamelan and enjoys
angklung and kroncong music — the sentimental song ‘Bengawan Solo’ can
still bring a tear to his eye. Furthermore, despite the geographical and
emotional distance between him and his family and the land of his birth,
he is very supportive of efforts by organisations such as the Vereniging
Herdenking Javaanse Immigratie (VHJI), the Association for the
Commemoration of Javanese Immigration (discussed below), to foster
and promote Javanese culture in Suriname.
Contemporary Suriname: key cultural practices
Based on interviews and focus groups (conducted mainly in Dutch,
occasionally in Javanese and in a few instances in Indonesian) with and
Javanese cultural traditions in Suriname 207
observations of Javanese Surinamese in June and July 2009, I discuss
some of the contemporary cultural practices of the Javanese in
Suriname and the extent to which Javanese ethnic affiliation is
dependent on active observation of and/or participation in those
cultural practices.
My paper is informed by two key ideas. The first is Fredrik
Barth’s (1970) challenge to the view that an ethnic group is a culture-
bearing unit. Within his broader discussion of boundary maintenance
among ethnic groups, Barth sees the sharing of a culture as a result,
rather than a definitional characteristic, of ethnic group organisation. He
argues that harnessing culture to an ethnic group does not allow for the
‘ecological circumstances’ that result in an ethnic group exhibiting
regional diversities in their cultural practice (Barth 1970:12).
From a theoretical perspective, I have found Barth’s thinking
to be pertinent to my study of the Javanese in Suriname on account of
his scrutiny of what it is that defines an ethnic group and in his key
concern with ‘ethnic groups and their persistence’ (Barth 1970:9).
Specifically, I was interested in what, if any, key cultural practices could
be regarded as ‘definitional characteristics’ of the Javanese ethnic
group in Suriname. In the context of the present paper, one might ask
whether those who perform localised forms of ludruk folk theatre and
tayuban dancing in Suriname can still rightly be called Javanese, because
their cultural practice has been subject to the ‘ecological circumstances’
of migration to a country on the other side of the world. One might
also ask whether those Javanese in Suriname who are not interested in
ludruk or tayuban and who speak only Dutch can still rightly be called
Javanese because they do not engage with Javanese cultural practices.
Of note is Suparlan’s observation (1995:137) that the arrival in
Suriname of Javanese cultural materials from Indonesia is welcomed
because those materials ‘sharpen(ed) the ethnicity of the Suriname
Javanese.’ De Waal Malefijt, too, noted that the reconstitution of
Javanese folk traditions in Suriname contributed greatly to the
cohesiveness of the Javanese as an ethnic group (de Waal Malefijt
1963:151). These suggestions of a mutually reinforcing relationship
between culture and ethnicity are somewhat at odds with Barth’s
assertion that the ethnic group is a more stable unit than the cultural
208 Allen
practices that generally ‘typify’ it — that is, that the continuity of an
ethnic group is not dependant on a simultaneous continuity of a set of
cultural practices (Barth 1970:38).
Extending the notion of what ‘typifies’ an ethnic group, the
second idea that informs my paper is that of exhibitionary culture.
Tony Bennett coined the term ‘exhibitionary complex’ to describe the
ways in which objects and bodies are transferred from enclosed and
private domains into public and open arenas, where they become
‘vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power’
(Bennett 1984:74). Used by Bennett to discuss public spectacles, such
as the 1851 Great Exhibition, which provide a context for the
permanent display of power and knowledge, the notion has also been
applied in the Indonesian context. The idea of the exhibitionary is
central to John Pemberton’s discussion of the construction of Taman
Mini Indonesia Indah, the ‘Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature’ cultural
centre that was a showpiece of the Suharto regime and that helped
cement the idea of a ‘national’ Indonesian culture. (Pemberton
1994:152–61) Greg Acciaoli also reveals how, by virtue of its
exhibitionary nature, a display in the National Museum in Jakarta of
the culture of the minority Bajau people is elevated into an ‘exemplar
of the maritime culture that is presented as a pan-Indonesian
inheritance’, thus appropriating the Bajau as part of the nation-building
enterprise (Acciaoli 2001:5). Bennett’s ideas are of particular relevance
to the ways in which certain cultural practices, such as dance and
gamelan, are adapted and performed by and through key institutions in
Suriname, namely the Society for the Commemoration of Javanese
Immigration and the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia, thereby
promoting an ‘official’ version of Javanese culture.
The examples discussed by Pemberton and Acciaoli are
evidence of what Allen Chun (1996:114) calls the authorising and
institutionalising of culture. The authorising and institutionalising of
Javanese culture in Suriname began before World War II, when the
Surinamese government actively promoted the survival of Javanese
culture. In the 1930s the governor initiated a so-called ‘Indianisation’
project to populate the colony with Javanese smallholders, who would
settle in Javanese desa (villages), complete with their own religious and
Javanese cultural traditions in Suriname 209
civil leadership. While this program was cut short by the war, the
existence in Suriname of villages with Javanese names such as
Sidoredjo, Wonoredjo, Tamansarie, Tamanredjo and Koewarasan
reflects a later 1950s policy of creating autonomous village-
communities, with a lurah as the head.7
In twenty-first-century Suriname the ‘exhibitionary’, and by
extension the authorising and institutionalising of culture, operates
through two key institutions: the Vereniging Herdenking Javaanse
Immigratie and the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia. In
addition, a number of key, and now aging, individuals play a significant
role in promoting Javanese and/or Indonesian culture.8
Vereniging Herdenking Javaanse Immigratie (VHJI)
Established in 1985, the aim of the VHJI is to contribute to national
awareness and conservation of Suriname art and culture in general and
Javanese art and culture in particular. This manifests itself in the
offering of a variety of classes, courses, performances and exhibitions,
with the motto of ‘show, do, live’, suggestive of the exhibitionary
nature and mission of the society. Children and young people are
especially targeted, and each evening at Sana Budaya, the home of
VHJI, one can find Javanese dance, gamelan, batik and/or pencak silat
(martial art) classes, attended predominantly, but not solely, by young
Javanese. While classes are reasonably well attended, most of the
Javanese I spoke to expressed only a passing interest in these activities,
and teenagers in particular would be more likely to go there to hear a
pop band such as the popular multi-ethnic Kasimex houseband rather
than to learn Javanese dance or music. The gamelan classes I observed
were attended by a group of males of varying ages, and one female, all
of whom seemed more interested in the drums than in the gamelan as a
whole (encouraged warmly by their vibrant young teacher, who was in
the process of adapting Lady Gaga’s song ‘Pokerface’ to the gamelan).
Kedutaan Besar Republik Indonesia (Embassy of the
Republic of Indonesia)
As de Bruijne and Schalkwijk point out (2005:253), ethnic groups in
Suriname by and large no longer maintain strong ties with their
homelands, because migration began over a hundred years ago. I would
210 Allen
add, too, the significant barrier to maintaining links that is posed by the
sheer geographical distance between Suriname and the ethnic
homelands. Nowadays Surinamese have closer links with the
Netherlands than they do with India, Indonesia or West Africa. The
Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia was established in 1995,
replacing the former consulate, with the express mandate of re-
establishing links with Indonesia and reinforcing Indonesian culture in
Suriname. This has taken the form of, among other things, the
donation of a gamelan orchestra by the provincial government of
Yogyakarta to the Javanese community in the plantation district of
Commewijne; offering classes in wayang kulit, dancing (srimpi, gambyong,
tayuban) pencak silat (Indonesian martial art) and Indonesian language;
and support for Javanese radio stations (Pertjaja, Garuda and Mustika)
and television stations such as Garuda Television (which also
sometimes broadcast in Indonesian). The embassy also has its own
Indonesian language radio station. While the exhibitionary nature of
the cultural activities and projects supported by the embassy reflects its
mission of promoting ‘national’ Indonesian culture, a significant
proportion of those cultural activities — the srimpi, gambyong and
tayuban dances, the gamelan — that ostensibly ‘typify’ Indonesian culture
are in fact Javanese. The hegemony of the Javanese, an ongoing source
of tension in Indonesia, is thus subtly, and probably unintentionally,
reinforced.
Dance classes that I observed at the Indonesian Embassy, like
the dance, gamelan and pencak silat classes at the VHJI, were run by
young Suriname-born Javanese who had been trained for a number of
years at Institut Seni Indonesia in Yogyakarta on Indonesian
government scholarships. The Indonesian language teachers at the
embassy were older Suriname-born Javanese who had themselves
learnt Indonesian at the embassy and who had visited Indonesia on a
number of occasions and who spoke fluent but very formal
Indonesian.
Participants in the classes were much more heterogeneous. As
mentioned above, by no means all participants in dance classes were
Javanese; their participation seemed to have more to do with the
aesthetic appeal of the dance rather than any emotional engagement
Javanese cultural traditions in Suriname 211

Figure 1.
Intermediate Indonesian language class,
Indonesian Embassy, Paramaribo, 9 July
2009. Participants were mainly Indian,
covering a range of professional and
educational backgrounds. Many wanted to
learn Indonesian so that they could follow the
Indonesian-language soap operas on local
television.

with the culture. The majority of participants in the Indonesian

language classes were Indian, with just a few Javanese students. Curious
to know why they were learning a language that they would be unlikely
to ever use in daily conversation, I discovered that the main motivator
was their frustration at not being able to understand the (unsubtitled)
Indonesian soap operas that occasionally screen on the Javanese
television stations.
There is support for the preservation of Javanese culture and
for fostering links with Indonesia from a number of high-profile
Surinamese Javanese. One of these is second-generation Javanese
Surinamese Bob Saridin, a retired IBM executive, who now runs an
Indonesian gift shop and import business.9 A former head of the VHJI
whose grandparents came to Suriname from Kediri in East Java, for
Bob Saridin one of the most symbolic Javanese cultural artefacts in
Suriname is the gamelan and he was at pains to ensure that the Javanese
community in Paramaribo would have access to good quality pelog and
slendro gamelan sets. It was during an extended period living in Holland
that Bob became interested in learning the Indonesian language, an
interest that was sharpened when, back in Suriname and in his capacity
as head of VHJI, he visited the Indonesian ambassador at the embassy.
Aware that his Indonesian language skills were non-existent and that
his Javanese was a crude form of low (ngoko) Javanese,10 he addressed
212 Allen
the ambassador in English. The latter responded in Javanese, saying
‘That’s weird; we have the same skin and our faces look the same, so
how come he speaks to me in English?’ Bob immediately enrolled in
Indonesian language classes, and was eventually asked by the Embassy
to teach the classes and do the radio broadcasts in Indonesian. He
made his first visit to Indonesia in 1989 and says he ‘felt like an
Indonesian’ and because he spoke fluent Indonesian everyone assumed
he was Indonesian. Unlike some of my other informants, Bob feels
that every Javanese harbours a desire to return to the tanah air, the
ancestral homeland. He is of the view that there are still strong ties
between descendants of those original Javanese settlers and what is
now Indonesia. In my conversation with him he made frequent
references to hubungan darah, blood ties. With regard to his own
children, however, the story is a rather different one — and one I heard
often. While he was at pains to teach them Javanese, now they only
speak Dutch. He spoke of a resistance on the part of younger,
especially urban, Javanese to learning Javanese, for fear of not being
maju (progressive).
Javanese cultural traditions: wayang, gamelan, ludruk,
dagelan
Mason (1970:296) suggested that, being isolated from the rest of the
population in Suriname by religion, language, culture and location, the
Javanese have made fewer adaptations to local conditions than other
ethnic groups. Forty years later, the situation is somewhat more
nuanced. While Javanese cultural practices are still evident, changes and
adaptations have moved them beyond their original form in Java.
In 1903 the Netherlands Trading Society bought a gamelan
orchestra for the Mariënburg sugar plantation workers, enabling them
to perform wayang kulit (shadow plays) and wayang wong (plays using
human actors). While in those early performances, in accordance with
how things were done in Java, princes and sultans spoke in high
Javanese (kromo inggil) and commoners spoke in ngoko, increasingly
Dutch and Sranan Tongo became the languages of wayang
performances, indicating a significant adaptation to local conditions.
In some settlements the lack of a gamelan orchestra was not an
impediment to keeping up Javanese traditions. People made their own
Javanese cultural traditions in Suriname 213

Figure 2. Local Suriname wayang kulit. These puppets have been made in order to
perform stories from West African folklore using the medium of wayang kulit.

gamelan instruments using (largely recycled) local materials, including

disused railway line and empty oil drums. The finished product,
comprising fewer instruments, sounded rather different from gamelan as
it was played in Java.
The legacy of that early ingenuity and adaptation of the
gamelan and wayang can be witnessed in Marioen Amatdanom, a now
elderly man who heard gamelan being played in his village when he was
a small boy, learnt how to play the instruments and to become a dalang
(shadow play puppeteer), and went on to make his own gamelan
instruments and wayang kulit puppets. His performance troupe is well-
regarded in Suriname and has been invited to perform in Holland and
other parts of Europe but, remarkably, he has never been to Indonesia.
He finds himself in a bind, wanting to see the land of his ancestors on
the one hand, but reluctant to go because if he did he would be asked
to play gamelan and demonstrate his skills as a dalang and he regards his
skills as inferior to those of the Javanese in Indonesia.
Another short-lived attempt to reinvent that tradition
occurred in the late 1970s when a local performer collaborated with
well-known dalang Kamirin Sordjo on developing wayang Anansi based
on the character of Anansi, one of the most important characters of
West African folklore, who is depicted as a spider, a human or
214 Allen
combinations thereof. Like other cultural products, the Anansi legends
had moved with African slaves to the Caribbean, including Suriname.
In twenty-first-century Suriname, wayang performances will only attract
a reasonable-sized audience if they are enlivened by dance and campur
sari, a mixture of pop music, dangdut, gamelan and sometimes other
musical genres such as keroncong (Supanggah 2003:1).
The popular entertainment routine known as ludruk originated
in East Java as a simple performance featuring a clown and a
transvestite singer and it ‘reeked with gender and sexual innuendo’
(Peacock and Bouvier 1994:13). Later it developed into a full dramatic
form, but the clown (the symbol of the ‘little man’) and the transvestite
remained the key characters (Hatley 1971:94). The dynamic nature of
ludruk is attested to by Peacock in his identification of three phases of
ludruk in Indonesia: the colonial phase of the thirties, the revolutionary
phase of the sixties, when ludruk became politicised (leading to the
disappearance or imprisonment of performers after the 1965
attempted coup) and the bourgeois nineties (Peacock 1994:15).
In Suriname, too, ludruk has proven to be a dynamic cultural
form. As with its more refined counterpart, the wayang, ludruk has had
a significant place in Javanese cultural performance in Suriname, with
all roles played by men until about 1970 when women began to
participate. Until the 1980s performances were all-night affairs with
actors using fixed scripts (adapted to the local Surinamese context),
with the exception of the clowns, who were free to improvise (van
Kempen 2002). Ludruk has now metamorphosed into cabaret, with the
sexual overtones alluded to by Peacock. There are three key groups
named after the places they were formed: Desa, Tamanredjo and
Domburg. Using recorded rather than live music, the focus of the
cabaret is usually contemporary issues in Suriname, recently including
gender, teenage pregnancy and AIDS. The language used is usually
ngoko Javanese interspersed with Sranan Tongo and Dutch.
In 2007 the Suriname cabaret troupe ‘Captain Does Cabaret’
toured Indonesia, performing in Surabaya, Solo, Yogyakarta and
Bandar Lampung. Although sometimes using ‘slang words which are
no longer recognised’,11 the performers also used kromo Javanese, to the
delight of their Javanese audiences. The Surinamese performers also
Javanese cultural traditions in Suriname 215
incorporated dangdut, Javanese pop songs and the Surabaya-style
slapstick kidungan into their performance, with its plot of the conflict
between young Surinamese and the older generation of Surinamese
who wish to maintain the old customs and traditions.
Language
In 1971 Lockard observed that ‘Javanese and Bahasa Indonesia continue
to be the major languages for all members of the community [in
Suriname]; very few know Dutch although more, particularly children,
have learned some Negro-English’ (Lockard 1971:56). In research
conducted at around the same time, Suparlan (1995:4) suggested that
the only thing that all Suriname Javanese shared was the Javanese
language. Almost forty years later, I found a rather different linguistic
landscape. The official language of Suriname, Dutch is the language of
the workplace, public functions, and the media. The more informal
lingua franca is Sranan Tongo (what Lockard referred to as ‘Negro-
English’). Similar to the case with other ethnic groups12 , the majority
of Javanese in Suriname speak Dutch. Most also speak or at least
understand Javanese, that is, a form of ngoko Javanese as it is spoken in
Java. While ‘Surinamese-Javanese’, as Hoefte calls it (1998a:169), is
similar to Javanese in phonology, morphology and syntax, it has
adopted many loan words from Sranan Tongo. Very few Javanese in
Suriname speak kromo Javanese.13 Although de Bruijne and Schalkwijk’s
research (2005:252) found that 43 per cent of Javanese in Suriname
speak Javanese at home, my observations reveal that increasingly,
younger generations cannot or will not speak Javanese. Some of those
younger Javanese prefer to use Sranan Tongo than Javanese.
Indonesian as it is spoken in Indonesia is rarely heard. The only people
who speak or understand it are those who have learnt it in formal
languages classes at the embassy, and the very small number of
Surinamese Javanese who regularly visit Indonesia.
Much has been written about the links between language and
culture. Billig (1997:8) tells us that ‘an identity is to be found in the
embodied habits of social life ... includ(ing) those of thinking and
using language.’ Joseph (2004:167) points out that a language cannot
spread culture to other people who speak the same language unless the
216 Allen
language is ‘embedded within the cultural habitus’. Language moulds
itself to a habitus, rather than vice versa. Given that the language of the
cultural habitus occupied by the Javanese in Suriname is Dutch rather
than Javanese and that, with increased participation in formal
education, Dutch is gradually displacing other languages (de Bruijne
and Schalkwijk 2005:252), and given the increasing reluctance of young
Javanese to speak Javanese, one could argue that the Javanese language
is currently not well embedded within the cultural habitus. If Javanese
cultural practices are to continue to spread in Suriname in the future,
they will be spread through the use of Dutch.
Religion
IRIS, the Interreligious Council in Suriname, was established in 1989,
with a mission of fostering solidarity and respect among religions in
Suriname. Like other inter-faith communities, the organisation works
through a focus on care for the disadvantaged: the poor, the aged and
the handicapped. The council is composed of representatives of the
main religions (excluding ‘folk’ religions), who meet twice each month
to discuss planned ecumenical activities and their positions on
government policies.
While the majority — but certainly no longer all, as Mason
asserted (1970:301), or even 97 per cent, as documented by Ismael
(1955:157) — of Javanese in Suriname are Muslim, it is no longer a
significant majority. Furthermore, Javanese Muslims are divided into
wong madhep ngulon (West-orientating people) and wong madhep ngetan
(East-orientating people), in reference to the fact that many of the
original immigrants built their mosques in Suriname facing west, as
they had in Java, whereas the longitude of Suriname dictates that
Mecca is in fact to the east. It was not until the 1930s that, partly
through contacts with Hindustani Muslims, people began to realise that
the Kaaba was not located to the west, but to the northeast of
Suriname. A group led by Pak Samsi then began to encourage people
to change the direction of prayer from west to east; those who did so
became the more orthodox Muslim group. (Chickrie 2009)
Many of the ‘Western’ Muslims subsequently converted to
Catholicism; religious conversion is unproblematic in Suriname.
Javanese cultural traditions in Suriname 217
(Several of my informants had converted from Islam to Catholicism for
largely pragmatic reasons: the five daily prayers and recitation of the
Koran were too time-consuming; they had married a Catholic; the nuns
at the Catholic hospital had been very kind during a hospital stay.) A
recent phenomenon, reported by Joop Vernooij (2007), is the
conversion of Javanese Muslims (and Indians Hindus) to
Pentecostalism. Vernooij reports that new religious movements such as
the Pentecostals are actively ‘recruiting’ among the Hindus and Muslims.
The ‘Eastern’ Muslims are orthodox and devout. Indeed,
several of these ‘Eastern’ Muslims told me that the future of Javanese
culture in Suriname lies solely with the mosque, and the need for a
general return to a more orthodox form of religious practice. The trend
towards labelling food and eating establishments as palas (meaning halal,
permitted for Muslims) is possibly indicative of that orthodoxy.
A notable feature of religious practice in Suriname is the
popularity and widespread adherence to the Javanese belief system
known as kejawen (sometimes translated as ‘Javanism’). Apparently
popular partly because of its lack of institutionalised structures and
partly because of, at one level, its simplicity, kejawen is essentially a
metaphysical search for harmony within one’s inner self, connection
with the universe, and with an Almighty God.
Because it is not a formal religion, in Indonesia kejawen is not
practised in isolation; rather, elements of it are incorporated into
Islamic practices. In Java, kejawen has been influenced by the teachings
of the twelfth-century Sufi, Ibn al-’Arabi, particularly his theory of the
unity of being (Woodward 1988:58). Woodward comments that in Java
‘virtually all’ kejawen Muslims consider themselves to be Muslim
(Woodward 1988:62).
Similar to the situation in Indonesia, kejawen has not always
been acknowledged as a ‘real’ religion in Suriname. It was not until the
establishment in 1999 of Nyawiji Agama Jawa Suriname, the Suriname
Federation of the Religion of Javanism, and the official Government
endorsement of its regulations and constitution in 2000 that kejawen
was afforded the status of a religion. The Federation now encompasses
fourteen member organisations representing more than 30,000
followers.
218 Allen
In twenty-first-century Suriname kejawen is strong and growing,
under the guidance of self-proclaimed leaders like Sapto Sopawiro who,
despite having never been to Indonesia, speaks and writes fluent
Indonesian as well as Javanese, is a dalang and an expert in all aspects of
kejawen. In my interview with him, Sapto, who heads a socio-religious
association called Carita Wujud14 Ngesti Tunggal, was categorical in his
belief that kejawen is inseparable from the Javanese way of life, thinking,
nature and tradition.15 For him the key tenet of kejawen is living in
harmony. While he and other followers of kejawen I interviewed in
Suriname are adamant that kejawen in Suriname is a socio-religious
practice in its own right, quite separate from Islam, it would be valuable
to trace the development of kejawen in Suriname to understand what, if
any, links there are to Sufi Islam, in line with Woodward’s research in
Java. It may be that, notwithstanding Sapto Sopawiro’s conviction, a
similar ‘deep penetration of Sufism’ (Woodward 1988:70) is revealed in
the fabric of Javanese culture in Suriname.
While Islam may be declining in significance as a cultural
marker of Javanese ethnicity in Suriname, notwithstanding the views of
some of the abovementioned ‘Eastern’ Muslims, kejawen, now an
official religion, seems to be an increasingly important Javanese cultural
signifier. It is a definitional characteristic, to use Barth’s term, in the
sense that while not all Javanese practise kejawen, only Javanese practise
kejawen.
Conclusion: ethnicity and culture
When I asked my informants in Suriname how they would describe
their ethnicity, I did not also ask what they understood by the term. Yet
their response was immediate, suggesting an internalisation of an
understanding of ethnicity, akin to Schermerhorn’s definition (1970:12)
of an ethnic group as a ‘collectivity within a larger society having real
or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared past, and a cultural
focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of
their peoplehood.’
One might conclude from the discussion in this paper that
Javanese ethnicity is worn relatively lightly in Suriname. Certainly the
symbolic elements of culture are not of equal and uniform importance
Javanese cultural traditions in Suriname 219
to all Javanese there. There are ‘Javanese’ villages such as Mariënburg
and Lelydorp, suggesting tight-knit geographically defined
communities, but Javanese people can also be found throughout the
country. Some mosques attract a predominantly Javanese congregation,
but they are not designated as ‘Javanese’ mosques. On the other hand,
kejawen is a significant cultural marker. Inter-marriage is common,
‘normal’ even, to quote Vernooij (2007:5).
Isaacs (1976:45) writes of the ‘ancestral homeland’, while
often distant in time and space, as being a ‘critical ingredient’ in
understandings of group identity. For the Javanese of Suriname that
ancestral homeland is Java, which is now a part of the much bigger
entity of Indonesia. For most Javanese in Suriname ‘Indonesia’ is an
alien concept. For them Java is the land from whence their ancestors
came, a land imagined for the most part, since very few Javanese in
Suriname have ever been there or will ever go there. Most of my
informants expressed a casual interest in seeing Java, ‘just to see the
place’, but very few expressed any real emotional attachment to
contemporary Java, fewer still to Indonesia. Most Javanese in Suriname
look to Holland rather than Indonesia. Links with the ‘ancestral
homeland’ are incidental, decorative and only occasionally deeply felt.
Notwithstanding the tenuous links with Indonesia and a
shadowy notion of the ancestral homeland, however, the Javanese of
Suriname do clearly identify as ethnically Javanese. Furthermore, while
Indonesian (especially Javanese) culture is supported and promoted
through the exhibitionary mission of key institutions such as the VHJI
and the Indonesian Embassy, this should not diminish the fact that the
cultural practices discussed in this paper do have symbolic significance
for the Javanese in Suriname and are regarded by Javanese and non-
Javanese alike as being unequivocal markers of the Javanese ethnic
group. ‘Being Javanese’ in Suriname is somewhat different than ‘being
Javanese’ in Indonesia, but in both cases, to return to Barth, it is
possible to understand key cultural practices, such as those discussed in
this paper, as definitional characteristics of the ethnic group.
220 Allen
Pamela Allen is an Associate Professor in the School of Asian Languages and
Studies, and Associate Dean (Teaching and Learning) in the Faculty of Arts at
the University of Tasmania. She teaches Indonesian language and studies, and can
be contacted at Pam.Allen@utas.edu.au

Notes
1. I would like to acknowledge here the support, assistance and friendship
extended to me during my time in Suriname by Wonny Karijopawiro, Jenny
Sopawiro and Charles Chang. Without them this paper could not have been
written.
2. I use the term ‘multicultural’ here as a descriptive term, referring to a
population that has diverse ethnic and cultural origins, rather than
multiculturalism as an ideology.
3. See Maroons of Suriname. http://www.faqs.org/minorities/South-and-
Central-America/Maroons-of-Suriname.html
4. This and other population figures are taken from the 2004 census.
5. Tensions between Brazilians and other ethnic groups are often high, with
sporadic outbreaks of violence between Brazilians and local gold miners.
6. In 2009 Billiton sold its Suriname bauxite and alumina operations to Alcoa.
7. In Indonesia the lurah is the head of the kelurahan, a sub-district of a village.
The kelurahan is the lowest level of a complex hierarchy of governance,
which has the President at the top.
8. I am not suggesting that this exhibitionary complex is unique to the
Javanese. Other ethnic groups in Suriname similarly exhibit their culture.
9. His most popular import item is Indomie, Indonesian instant noodles!
10. Every Javanese sentence indicates a speech level or degree of politeness,
mainly by means of the selection of vocabulary and choice of affixes. The
vocabulary types are: Ngoko: non-polite and informal, used in addressing
someone with whom the speaker is very familiar; Madyo: semi-polite and
semi-formal; Kromo: polite and formal. The fourth type does not in itself
indicate any degree of formality, and may be used in conjunction with words
of any of the other three types to indicate high respect toward the
addressee. Kromo Inggil words are used to refer to a highly respected person,
his actions and his possessions; and Kromo Andap words are used in referring
to any person’s actions toward a highly respected person (Poedjosoedarmo
1968:57–8).
Javanese cultural traditions in Suriname 221
11. According to the report on the website of the Embassy of the Republic
of Suriname in Jakarta http://www.surinameembassyjakarta.org/index_news.
php?main=news/2008-02-12.php
12. De Bruijne and Schalkwijk (2005:252) report that the use of Dutch at
home is more widespread among Creoles than among Javanese and
Hindustanis.
13. When Salam Paul Somohardjo, speaker of the National Assembly of
Suriname, visited Java in 2006, the Jakarta Post diplomatically described his
Javanese as ‘more indigenous than that used by Javanese today’, describing
his vocabulary as ‘similar to what one can find among the Javanese living in
the Menoreh mountain range, Gunung Kidul in Yogyakarta and the Semu
mountain range areas in Central Java.’ (Salam Paul Somohardjo: Speaking
Javanese better than the locals, Jakarta Post, 22 September 2006)
14. In Javanese, wujud refers to the unity of the human soul and Allah.
(Woodward 1988:58)
15. Some members of the Afro-Surinamese population also maintain links
with their African roots through the practice of the Winti religion, which
was banned by law as idolatry until 1973, but is increasingly being practised
by Afro-Surinamese alongside Christianity.

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