Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures

ISSN: 0039-7709 (Print) 1931-0676 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vsym20

Modernity, Sexuality, and Gender in Pramoedya

Ananta Toer's This Earth of Mankind (1980)

Carl Niekerk

To cite this article: Carl Niekerk (2011) Modernity, Sexuality, and Gender in Pramoedya Ananta
Toer's This Earth of Mankind (1980), Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures,
65:2, 77-98, DOI: 10.1080/00397709.2011.573728

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00397709.2011.573728

Published online: 16 Jun 2011.

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Symposium, Vol. 65, No. 2, 77–98, 2011
Copyright

C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0039-7709 print / 1931-0676 online
DOI: 10.1080/00397709.2011.573728

CARL NIEKERK
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

Modernity, Sexuality, and Gender in Pramoedya

Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind (1980)

This essay looks at the construction of the “modern” in the novel This Earth of
Mankind (1980) by the Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925–2006).
When the novel’s protagonist, Minke, a Native Indonesian living on Java around
1900, is introduced to the idea of the “modern” by Dutch teachers and friends, he
gradually discovers the inconsistencies underlying Western conceptualizations of
the “modern,” in particular regarding sexuality and gender. The novel argues for
a reconsideration of the “modern” from a non-Western perspective that, instead
of defending one homogenous vision of modernity with roots in the West, allows
for multiple trajectories for modernity. Such alternative ways of conceptualizing
the “modern” seek to capitalize on the increased mobility that accompanied
Western colonialism, using this mobility as a chance to come to a multilateral
understanding of what it means to be “modern” that includes a reorientation
toward Native culture.

Postcolonial studies has always emphasized the importance of understanding texts

in their geopolitical and historical contexts, and by doing so, has contributed to a
considerable diversification within literary scholarship. As part of the increasing
importance of postcolonial studies, an interesting dialectic between the “global”
and the “local” has become visible. Colonialism introduced an era of increased
global mobility and, closely intertwined with it, Western dominance. This in-
creased mobility, however, also gave access to the stories of peoples and cultures
far away from the West’s metropolitan centers. While emphasizing the importance
of local histories, postcolonial studies has recognized that it is not unproblematic
to access local forms of knowledge, or to “let the other speak.” The era of glob-
alization that paralleled colonization led to asymmetries in power and claims of

77
78 Symposium

discursive ownership. This development did not remain limited to colonial times;
many of these asymmetries are still in place in our postcolonial world today.
Postcolonial studies has become a discourse with its own sets of problems, its
own theories, and its own preferred areas of the world. Certainly in the field of
literary analysis, far more attention has been paid to postcolonial authors writing
in English than to those writing in other languages.1 The following essay seeks
to help remedy this situation by offering a case study on the Indonesian author
Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novel This Earth of Mankind, the first volume of the
Buru Quartet, first published in 1980. I am in particular interested in the role that
the concept of the “modern” plays in this novel, its links to intercultural mobility
in the colonial context, and its impact on the construction of sexuality and gender.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925–2006, Indonesia) is one of the authors to whom
postcolonial studies has paid too little attention. In contrast to V. S. Naipaul or
Salman Rushdie, for instance—both of whom are considered by many exemplary
contemporary postcolonial authors—Pramoedya was not Western trained, did not
publish in English as his first language, and in fact rarely left Indonesia. He did
not become part of the postcolonial literary canon in part because he was not
able to advocate for his own books by promoting them abroad.2 This is because
he spent a significant part of his writing life imprisoned, exiled, or under house
arrest. From 1947 to 1949, Pramoedya was imprisoned (and tortured) by the Dutch
after being arrested during what he himself terms “the first military action” that
was part of the Dutch reaction to Indonesia’s fight for independence—a colonial
intervention that is referred to even today in Dutch public discourse as the first
“police action” (“politionele actie”).3 In 1960, he was imprisoned by the Sukarno
regime for speaking out for the rights of Indonesia’s sizeable Chinese minority.
When General Suharto led an American-supported military putsch in Indonesia
in 1965, Pramoedya was among the first intellectuals arrested. Eight of his book
manuscripts and his entire library were destroyed (Exile 73, 108). After spending
time in several prisons, he was moved to remote Buru Island in 1969 as part of a re-
educational project that forced intellectuals and other critics of Suharto’s regime
to earn their own living under the extremely primitive (and firmly premodern)
conditions of remote Buru Island. Pramoedya was released as one of the last Buru
prisoners in 1979 but remained under house arrest in Jakarta until the end of the
Suharto regime in 1998.
These experiences of captivity, incarceration, isolation, and exile shaped
Pramoedya’s writing. He wrote his first novel, The Fugitive, while imprisoned
by the Dutch in the late 1940s. His 1969 “exile” (a term he frequently uses him-
self) within Indonesia to remote Buru Island would eventually become what in
hindsight must be called an exceptionally prolific phase in his writing career, once
the authorities allowed him to write. On Buru Island, he not only produced the
Modernity in This Earth of Mankind 79

Buru Quartet but several other important novels, along with the notes that would
constitute his autobiographical The Mute’s Soliloquy. These experiences of exile
and detention led him to reflect on the importance of mobility and globalization;4
they made him conceive of an audience for his novels that was global rather than
local, while also shaping his reflections on the importance of the “modern” in an In-
donesian and global context. Pramoedya offers what is in many respects a dissident
voice. He is highly critical of the label “postcolonial writing”—a term he rejected
for his own work, calling it “only the creation of academics in the university.”5
Postcolonial studies has embraced poststructuralist and postmodernist theorizing,
albeit at times somewhat ambivalently (see Loomba 251). But Pramoedya’s work
suggests that it is actually the idea of the “modern” that is necessary not only for
understanding Indonesia’s colonial history but also for articulating a response to
it. Although Pramoedya offers a critical account of modernity, his work also ar-
ticulates, albeit hesitantly, an affirmative relationship to the idea of the “modern.”
Much like Ahdaf Soueif in The Map of Love (1999), Pramoedya identifies the
years around 1900 as a key moment in colonial history when choices were made
that would have a long-lasting impact.
This Earth of Mankind is the first volume of the Buru Quartet, a series of
novels for which Pramoedya conducted research in the early 1960s, before his
imprisonment in 1965 under the Suharto regime. The narratives that make up
This Earth of Mankind were first told to fellow prisoners on Buru Island in 1973,
before Pramoedya was allowed writing equipment. Later, in 1975, he wrote the
narratives down. These texts subsequently were smuggled out of Buru Island with
the help of the Catholic Church (see Exile 80). The book was first published in
Indonesia in 1980 and was an immediate public success. In May 1981, however,
Indonesian authorities banned the book, arguing that it contained a covert defense
of Marxist-Leninist ideology.6 In 1988, two students were arrested and sentenced
to seven and eight years in prison for attempting to sell and being in possession of
books by Pramoedya (Karolides 493, 494). As late as 2001, Pramoedya’s books
were publicly burned by Islamic and anticommunist groups (Karolides 494). At
that time, Pramoedya temporarily moved important documents to the American
embassy (Exile 106).
This Earth of Mankind’s main protagonist and principal narrator is Minke, a
Native student at a Dutch high school. Minke lives in Surabaya on the island of
Java, and he turns eighteen in August 1898 (at the beginning of the novel). The other
main character in This Earth of Mankind, and a major character in Buru Quartet in
general, is Nyai Ontosoroh (whose first name is Sanikem).7 “Nyai” is a title given
to Native concubines of European men in the Dutch Indies. Nyai Ontosoroh is the
concubine of Herman Mellema, the wealthy Dutch owner of a large agricultural
company, Boerderij Buitenzorg, just outside of Surabaya. She de facto runs that
80 Symposium

company by herself after he leaves her. Nyai Ontosoroh has two children with
Mellema: Robert and Annelies, the latter of whom is Minke’s main love interest in
This Earth of Mankind. The novel centers on Minke’s development following his
initial encounter with Nyai Ontosoroh and Annelies and their struggle to maintain
their independence, control over their own lives and the company they run. This
Earth of Mankind seeks to draw readers in by suggesting a romantic narrative,
while the text is also an intense meditation on race, sexuality, and gender in
a colonial context and on the relevance of the ideas of the “modern” and the
“global” in relation to these categories.

ON BEING MODERN
One of the most visible and influential Western theoreticians of the “modern”
is without a doubt Jürgen Habermas. While Habermas acknowledges that the term
“modern” throughout its history has meant many different things, he is primar-
ily interested in the Enlightenment’s impact on conceptualizing the “modern.”
Since the French Enlightenment, according to Habermas, the West has associated
“modernity” with the “belief, inspired by modern science, in the infinite progress
of knowledge and in the infinite advance towards social and moral betterment.”8
Understood in this way, “to be modern” has meant a break with “all specific histor-
ical ties” (“Modernity versus Postmodernity” 4). The “modern” aims to transcend
time and space, to get rid of old baggage, the “normalizing function of tradition”
(5), in favor of a dynamic view of the world that emphasizes its openness to human
improvement (modernization). In addition to its philosophical and societal conno-
tations (e.g., its emphasis on the subject’s ability to set her or his own norms and
implement these in society), the term “modern” also has an aesthetic dimension.
Habermas associates it not only with a call for innovative forms of artistic expres-
sion (4, 5), but with the belief that the arts will develop a “further understanding
of the world and the self, [. . .] promote moral progress, the justice of institutions,
and even the happiness of human beings” (9). What may today strike us as naı̈ve
about such ideas, Habermas himself also admits, are the unambiguously positive
values the “modern” attributes to knowledge, indeed regardless of time and space,
as if knowledge were a generally acquirable commodity that could only be used
for good.
Perhaps surprisingly, This Earth of Mankind discusses a concept of the “mod-
ern” that is remarkably similar to Habermas’s.9 The novel’s main protagonist,
Minke, reflects explicitly and repeatedly on the question of what it means to be
modern, and in fact, the novel opens with deliberations about this. Minke asso-
ciates the term “modern” with “learning and science” (16). He is aware of the
concept’s fashionability. The term “modern” has “surged forward and multiplied
Modernity in This Earth of Mankind 81

itself like bacteria through the world,” but he admits to not knowing exactly what
it means (18). Nevertheless, he puts his “trust in scientific understanding and in
reason” (19). More telling than these attempts to conceptualize the “modern” are
the examples Minke gives: printing, for instance, and especially the innovative
process of “zincography” that allows for the easy reproduction of photographs
of objects all around the world (he mentions “American skyscrapers,” by way of
example; 17). Minke also mentions trains and “even smaller machines” propelled
by oil rather than steam (18) and is interested in electricity and experiments with
flight (18, 19). Modernity in This Earth of Mankind is linked to mobility and to
globalization, understood here as the ability to know more about the world “by
enabling the Native subject to cognitively map his geographical position within
the larger world.”10
In the examples discussed thus far, a technological revolution enables society
to become modern; modernity is the result of a process of modernization.11 In The
Girl from the Coast, another novel by Pramoedya, the protagonist is fascinated
by light bulbs and electricity (19); in Footsteps, the third volume of the Buru
Quartet, the lure of the modern manifests itself in Minke’s interest in bicycles
(59). A quintessential example of this kind of modernity in This Earth of Mankind
is aspirin, “the most powerful medicine discovered in the history of humanity,”
as Minke is told by newspaper reports, and “a medicine that would do away
with headaches forever” (180)—how can that be bad? Later in the novel, when
challenged to define the “modern” by two Dutch girls, Sarah and Miriam de la
Croix, daughters of a progressive Dutch assistant resident, Minke describes the
new word “modern,” quoting Magda Peters, the Dutch woman who is his favorite
teacher, as “a spirit, an attitude, a way of looking at things that emphasizes the
qualities of scholarship, aesthetics, and efficiency” (143). This statement shows
that Minke sees modernization as more than just a societal process; in his mind,
the term has not only a philosophical dimension—the ability to think on one’s own
feet—but an aesthetic dimension as well. It stands for a fundamentally different,
“new” way of looking at reality and representing that reality. Minke fetishizes
modernity12—but is he able to use this interest in modernity against the colonial
status quo?
It is interesting to see how both Pramoedya’s This Earth of Mankind and
Habermas’s essay portray sociohistorical and philosophical conceptualizations of
modernity as complementary and as reinforcing one another. For both thinkers,
the “modern” indicates both modernization as a societal process (in the form of
scientific and technological progress) and the philosophical goal of being more
autonomous and no longer dependent on tradition or on one’s immediate material
needs. The suggestion is furthermore that this knowledge is something objectively
desirable and unaffected by ideological use or abuse; the combination of advanced
82 Symposium

knowledge with technological progress suggests that modernity is something un-

ambiguously positive. Minke’s repeated insistence that he does not know exactly
what the term “modern” means and that he only relies on others’ definitions (18,
143) can be understood as indicating that he sees this process of modernization as
still open and that its eventual results are unclear to him. But it may also be indica-
tive of a lack of comfort with the European origins of the term and of a hesitation
that has something to do with the intuition that the impact of the “modern” on life
in the Indies manifests itself in ways hard to predict but that may lend themselves
to reinforcing the position of the European colonizers.
Habermas’s concept of the “modern” is far from naı̈ve; it is complex and self-
critical, and in fact in later texts, Habermas emphasizes that a critical dimension
is inherent to the discourse of modernity.13 The point that I want to make in this
essay, though, is that a postcolonial critique of the “modern” is different from
Western conceptualizations of a (self-)critical modernity such as Habermas’s. The
term “modern” can have many and at times even contradictory meanings.14 It
is precisely the instability of the term that needs to be addressed if we want
to investigate its functioning in a non-Western context. Pramoedya’s sense of
“modernity” diverges from that of Habermas and other (Western) theorists in that
it links the question of the “modern” to a sense of globalization and mobility, to
the knowledge that there are lots of other peoples, cultures, and value systems
out there and that these deserve to be respected. The potential for communicating
across cultures is a constitutive element of Pramoedya’s view of modernity.15 From
the very beginning of This Earth of Mankind, the protagonist is also interested
in the local value and use of the idea of the modern. Pramoedya’s novel departs
relatively quickly from the Habermasian paradigm of the “modern” by asking
what the relevance of this idea is in the domains of sexuality and gender relations.
The real test for “modernity” is to what extent it can implement its agenda of
emancipation, also in the areas of gender and sexuality. In particular, “modernity”
for Pramoedya is linked intimately to the issue of women’s rights.

SEXUALITY

Sexuality is one of the domains in which the idea of the “modern” is framed
vis-à-vis its colonial and postcolonial contexts. In the regulation of sexual be-
havior, the link between colonialism and modernity becomes problematic. In the
Netherlands Indies, as in other colonial settings, colonial sexuality and gender
relations are regulated in extreme detail. The implicit or explicit legislation of sex-
ual relations in the colony is increasingly affected by the idea of modernization.
Around 1900, there is a clear clash between colonialist rhetoric, which interprets
its civilizing mission as the introduction of a specifically modern agenda in the
Modernity in This Earth of Mankind 83

Netherlands Indies, and a colonial practice,16 which aims at maintaining archaic,

antiempancipatory, patriarchal, and decisively premodern conditions in the realm
of sexuality.
This point is clearest in This Earth of Mankind in the figure of Nyai Ontosoroh.
The term “nyai” indicates a social role particular to Dutch colonial politics in the
Indies (although by no means unique in the colonial world). The most common
translations for “nyai” are “concubine” and “housekeeper.” In a sense, these two
translations indicate the ambiguous status of the “nyai” and the fundamentally
contradictory expectations to which she was submitted in colonial society. She
was a sexual object, meant to keep men from more risky sexual behavior by
offering something like a monogamous relationship. However, the nyai also had
a cultural mission: Her linguistic, medical, and cultural know-how helped Dutch
men survive in a country about which they knew little.17 For a long time, authorities
in the Netherlands Indies encouraged a system of concubinage between white men
and Native women.18 In the 1880s, roughly half of European men were unmarried
but living with Asian women (Stoler 48). Around 1900, however, colonial policies
toward concubinage started to change: Living with a nyai was discouraged (Baay
114–19), and preference was given to either prostitution or marriage, with marriage
intended to take place only between white Europeans (Stoler 51). At the same time,
the nyai’s “immoral” nature became a topic of public concern (Stoler 68, 76).19
Nyai Ontosoroh fulfills the cultural expectations placed on her extremely well.
This is acknowledged by Herman Mellema, her partner or “master,” initially an
idealistic European intellectual who wanted to fight dominating colonial practices
while simultaneously maintaining European dominance.20 After hesitating to take
on a nyai, Mellema makes “his” nyai into a pedagogical project and becomes
her teacher (76, 89, 90). A (perhaps unintended) side effect of Nyai Ontosoroh’s
education is her desire to be independent in case her master leaves her (88, 89).
When Nyai Ontosoroh asks Mellema whether her education is comparable to that
of European women, he responds by declaring her “far more capable than the
average European woman, especially the Mixed-Bloods” (92). As racist as the
presuppositions of such a comment may be, the remark does point to a potentially
utopian aspect of Nyai Ontosoroh’s socialization: She embodies a pedagogical
ideal outside of all colonial categories. Nyai Ontosoroh eventually turns out to be
very effective in running Boerderij Buitenzorg on her own; at the moment Minke
first meets Nyai Ontosoroh and her daughter, she is in sole and successful charge
of the corporation. Nyai Ontosoroh never denies that within the colonial system
she is primarily a sex object: “a bought slave, whose only duty is to satisfy her
master” (87). In a conversation with Magda Peters she wants to be addressed as
“Nyai,” because that is what she sees as reality: “I’m not used to being called
ma’am and indeed I’m not a Mrs. It’s not an appropriate way to refer to me,
84 Symposium

not my right. Call me Nyai as other people do, because that’s what I am, miss”
(228).
Eventually the reality of being the property of a colonialist, of being primarily
a sexual object, will catch up with her. Maurits, Herman Mellema’s son from his
European marriage, who will later claim Boerderij Buitenzorg as his inheritance,
reproaches his father that he is responsible for the “birth of two bastard children”
(99). In Maurits’s view, his father has “committed a blood sin, a crime against
blood! Mixing Christian European blood with colored, Native, unbeliever’s blood!
A sin never to be forgiven!” (100). Maurits reduces people to their race and to
their ability to procreate. In the area of sexuality, the encounter between the races
becomes problematic because it mixes what should not be mixed.21 For Herman
Mellema the confrontation with his European son is a catalyst. No longer an
idealist who wants to civilize the colony, he becomes a racist and a cynic. In fact,
he denies that civilization can have any effect on race: “You think, boy,” he says at
his first and only encounter with Minke, “because you wear European clothes, mix
with Europeans, and can speak a little Dutch you then become a European? You’re
still a monkey!” (47). Additionally, this passage makes also clear that “Minke,”
the name given to the protagonist by one of his teachers (39), is not a “sign of
respect,” as his grandfather suggests (40), but just a racist stereotype equating
Natives to animals.
The persistence of a trend that reduces Native and Indo-European women to
their biology (to their sexuality), in contrast to the modern ideal of autonomy that
This Earth of Mankind presents initially, is also noticeable where other characters
are concerned. Herman Mellema and his son from his relationship with Nyai
Ontosoroh, Robert, follow in a sense the latest Dutch colonial policies by moving
out of Nyai Ontosoroh’s household and moving more or less permanently into the
Chinese brothel next door. Robert’s opinions demonstrate the close ties between
race and sexuality in colonial thinking. He “hates everything Native, except the
pleasure he can get from them” (66). One can stipulate that like his friend Robert
Suurhof, Robert Mellema hopes to marry a Dutch girl to improve his status in
society (22, 23). Both are obsessed with what Ann Laura Stoler has called “white
prestige” (54). Robert’s rape of his sister Annelies is nothing but an enactment
of this ideology. He is asserting his power over his “Native” sister who identifies
with their Native mother, while he himself identifies strongly with his European
father. His desire to be perceived as European is very strong, and yet he is also
haunted by the knowledge that according to his own racist value system he will
always be categorized as Indo-European, as a racial hybrid (Indo).
In its depictions of the brothel where Herman Mellema and his son spend their
time, This Earth of Mankind points to the international trade in women as the other
side—the dark side—of a modernity understood as a process of globalization and
Modernity in This Earth of Mankind 85

internationalization. This dark side is presented through the very detailed life story
that Maiko, a Japanese prostitute who has been brought to the Indies, tells during
the trial about Mellema’s murder (169ff.). For Maiko, becoming a “concubine”
would mean a step up on the social ladder and more freedom: “A concubine’s
life was not so harsh as a prostitute’s; you could live reasonably, and were freer
than the wife of a Japanese youth who hoped for capital from his future woman”
(171). But the reality is that Maiko is traded from one brothel owner to the next
for increasingly less money (she contracts syphilis), and she is shipped from
Hong Kong to Singapore and eventually to Surabaya. Maiko is in many respects
a counter figure to Nyai Ontosoroh. She is powerless because she does not speak
any language other than Japanese, suggesting that those who do not have access to
language and knowledge will be victims in the global economy of colonialism. The
exact status in society of the brothel for which she works remains unclear, although
one could say that the practice of prostitution is at least tolerated. The very first
time Minke passes the place, he comments that everyone knows it is a “pleasure-
house” owned by Babah Ah Tjong (24). Later we learn from Maiko that owning
a brothel is a status symbol for wealthy Chinese (172). The international trade
in women to which Maiko’s story refers and her report on sexually transmitted
diseases among prostitutes serve as reminders of the sexual abuse condoned by
the colonial system.
Colonialism and sexuality also intersect in the fate of Annelies, the daughter
of Nyai Ontosoroh and Herman Mellema. There is a direct link between Robert
Mellema’s rape of his sister Annelies (241, 242) and a colonial society that em-
phasizes race and has increasingly less space for people of mixed ethnic or racial
heritage. By raping his sister, Robert is exerting power over Annelies; he is acting
out his desire to be European, in the knowledge that he will always be perceived as
hybrid, as Indo-European. Minke’s own view of Annelies is not always positive.
Although he respects her decisiveness and ability to take charge (as discussed in
the next section, “Gender”), he is also critical of her passiveness and childlike
attitude. At times he refers to her as “crybaby” and “spoiled, just like a little child”
(157) and as “that fragile doll of mine” (343). To what extent are these character
traits attributed to Annelies products of a colonial society in which women have
few chances, few perspectives in life, and a limited education at best? Finally,
the intersection between colonial policy and sexuality is manifest in the fact that
Dutch courts nullify the marriage between Annelies and Minke because it has
been recognized only according to Islamic law, and not European law, and there
are no children (see 329, 336, 338, and 339). By doing so, the court takes away
Annelies’s right to decide about her own sexuality and places her instead under
the guardianship of Maurits Mellema, her stepbrother, who does not have her best
intentions in mind.
86 Symposium

GENDER

While identifying a sexual repression at the roots of the Dutch colonial system
in the Netherlands Indies that claims to speak in the name of modernity but in
practice acts against the ideals of women’s autonomy and emancipation, and
without denying the harsh aggression of this system, This Earth of Mankind
nevertheless seeks to redefine gender roles in a modern sense. The novel formulates
alternatives not only to European colonial conceptualizations of gender but also
to Native culture. But is the concept of the “modern” effective in countering the
colonial sexual exploitation of women? To some extent, the novel develops its
own vision of gender, tries to conceive of the role of women in society differently,
and eventually seeks to translate its findings into an ideology.
This is clear very early in the novel when Minke first visits Boerderij Buiten-
zorg and finds that he needs to adapt his own gendered stereotypes. Women play
an important role in Nyai Ontosoroh’s company. Minke is quite surprised to see
“[w]omen working in a business” and immediately associates this with a modern
way of looking at the world: “I was dumbfounded to see women leaving their
kitchens in their homes, wearing work clothes, seeking a living in someone else’s
business, mixing with men! Was this also a sign of the modern era in the Indies?”
(35, 36).22 Minke also must adjust his ideas about nyais. Annelies’s mother defies
all stereotypes of nyais as lazy, uncultured, and lust obsessed in ways similar to
prostitutes—attributes that “the whole world” associates with nyais (54). Later
Minke speaks of “old prejudices” toward nyais (184) that his friend Jean Marais
still appears to have and suggests that he himself has left these behind. The positive
image Minke has of Nyai Ontosoroh is reflected in his views of Annelies, whose
managerial skills he admires: “This childlike girl who had never graduated from
primary school suddenly stood revealed as a person of extraordinary character:
Not only was she such an efficient manager, but she could ride horses and could get
more milk from her cows than any of the other workers” (37, 38). But Annelies’s
“masculinity” and the blurring of gender distinctions in this “modern” household
and company in general also are threatening to Minke: Annelies can ride horses;
Minke is not very comfortable around them (39).
The issue of gender plays a major role in the discussion between Minke and
Dr. Martinet about “the difference between the attitudes of European and Native
men towards women” (203), or in other words, about the cultural dimensions of
gender relations. Martinet initially speaks vaguely of Minke’s ability to “remain
free and sincere with Annelies” (202). It is soon clear, though, that these allusions
refer to whether Minke will take several wives. The question of the “harem” is
raised earlier in the novel in a conversation between Minke and his high school
friend Robert Suurhof (23). For Martinet, this is a cultural issue. He assumes that
Modernity in This Earth of Mankind 87

because Minke is Native and Muslim, he will want to have more than one wife; he
then frames the problem as a clash of European versus Islamic values and asserts
European superiority. Dr. Martinet thus seems to advocate (European) monogamy
and freedom of choice, and yet at the same time he says he will propose to Annelies
on Minke’s behalf if Minke does not do so himself (203)—an action that goes
in the direction of arranged marriage and of treating women as objects of trade.
Minke never considers taking more than one wife; for him, this is not an issue
of “culture” but of human decency and individual choice. He has arrived at his
decision on the basis of stories of women in his family and specifically the thoughts
of his grandmother on this issue (203). In spite of the fact that their discussion
suggests that Dr. Martinet one-sidedly privileges a European perspective, Minke
characterizes him as “a friend of humanity” (259). In part, this is maybe because
Martinet is important for Minke’s view of the human psyche, and he teaches
Minke to talk and think about sexuality as a key to human behavior (257). This
way of thinking about sexuality simultaneously gives the reader an important tool
for understanding the novel.
While Dr. Martinet’s motives are ambiguous—it is suggested that he himself
hopes to marry Annelies (246)—Nyai Ontosoroh has very clear ideas of how
women and men should relate. Referring to her own history, Nyai states unam-
biguously: “I don’t want to see my child go through such cursed experiences as
these. You must marry properly. Marry someone like you, of your own free will”
(87). After she discovers that Minke has kissed Annelies, she insists he do it again
in front of her (42, 51). She also allows Minke and Annelies to sleep in one room
and in one bed together, even though they are not married (223). She is in no rush
to have Minke and Annelies married (290) in spite of their having sexual relations.
Such liberal ideas about sexuality clearly clash with Western policies. We learn
that Minke may be dismissed from school because he might be married (209).
Later this indeed happens (temporarily), because he has a sexual relationship with
Annelies (285, 286). Because of the sexual knowledge he has, he is considered
a “danger to the female students” (286). In comparison to the openness with
which Nyai Ontosoroh approaches the issue of sexuality, the speculation in the
press about whether he has a sexual relationship with Nyai Ontosoroh or Annelies
appears backward. His relationships are “subjected to disgusting and uncivilized
insinuating questions. I was amazed that Europeans, my teachers, my civilizers,
could behave in such a way” (283). In the end, Minke can stay in school but has
to sit on his own bench and cease contact with women (293).
While Minke earlier refused to compare Native and European value systems,
he does do so at the end of the text, when colonial officials threaten to ship Annelies
to Europe. Minke is reminded of his mother’s statement that “[t]he Dutch are very,
very powerful but they have never stolen people’s wives as did the kings of Java”
88 Symposium

(327)—a statement that turns out to be untrue. When read in the context of the
events surrounding Annelies’s abduction, this assertion points to the hypocrisy
of Europe’s values and its self-imposed civilizing mission. Europeans do not
act according to their own, self-proclaimed “modern” standards. What follows
from the words of Minke’s mother is an indictment of both European culture
and Javanism: Both should be condemned for their treatment of women. It is
interesting that this insight is formulated by Minke’s mother, who does not speak
Dutch and is very much part of Javanese culture. This too is a statement about the
idea of the “modern”: In the fields of sexuality and gender, the “modern” is not
necessarily a privilege of one culture over another but rather something that needs
to be reinvented continually and everywhere.

FINDING A MODERN VOICE

In This Earth of Mankind, the idea of the “modern” not only has an impact on
how society and subjectivity are shaped, but, closely intertwined with those issues,
it also is linked to the search for a narrative model and a genealogy for “modern”
Indonesian literature. For Minke, as I already noted, the term “modern” also has
aesthetic connotations (see 143). Minke is searching for a narrative form that
allows him to communicate his experiences to others. Or phrased in a different
way, Minke is looking for a mode of writing that acknowledges the elements
of mobility, sexuality, and gender that are constitutive for his view of what is
“modern.” This desire translates into the ambition to write in a modern way. He is
interested in an approach, as he indicates in a conversation with Sarah and Miriam
de la Croix, that looks into the “sociological and psychological background” of
literature, something he considers typical for Dutch writers in the 1880s (138).23
Minke does not define this “sociological and psychological” element in literature,
but instead proposes to Sarah and Miriam that they look at specific texts. The
example all three eventually agree upon is Multatuli (139), even though he is not
a member of the generation of 1880.
Multatuli is the pen name of the Dutch colonial official Eduard Douwes
Dekker (1820–1887), who left the colonial service after none of his superiors
responded to his denunciation of corrupt practices by Native and Dutch officials
(he eventually was accused of financial mismanagement himself). He subsequently
wrote a novel highly critical of Dutch colonialism in the Netherlands Indies.
Multatuli is mentioned often in the Buru Quartet. For his first journalistic writings,
Minke chooses the pen name Max Tollenaar (212), an unambiguous reference
to Max Havelaar, the protagonist of Multatuli’s novel, Max Havelaar: Or the
Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (1860). The many embedded
stories in Buru Quartet, the use of multiple narrative perspectives, its free use of
Modernity in This Earth of Mankind 89

colloquialisms, its complete lack of hesitation to use elements of popular fiction,

and its promise of an intriguing love story are all characteristics Pramoedya’s
Buru Quartet shares with Multatuli’s writings in general and with Max Havelaar
in particular.24 Adopting a Dutch colonial author as a model in a genealogy for an
independent, modern Indonesian literature is not unproblematic, even if Multatuli’s
stances on colonialism were very critical. This Earth of Mankind, however, also
offers other examples of “modern” writing.
At the end of Chapter 4, Minke mentions “the daughter of the Bupati of J—,
the first Native woman to write in Dutch,” whose texts have even been published
in literary magazines (72). This is a reference to Kartini (1879–1904), who would
become part of world literature through the posthumous publication of her Letters
of a Javanese Princess (first published in Dutch in 1911, and in English in 1920), a
text based on letters she wrote to Dutch friends. But around 1900, the same time in
which This Earth of Mankind takes place, Kartini had already published a number
of short texts in a variety of Dutch-language publications.25 In Child of all Nations,
the second volume of the Buru Quartet, Kartini is mentioned several times as a
successful model for describing the dilemmas confronting Indonesia’s population
and women in particular (101–02, 182). It is no coincidence that both The Letters
of a Javanese Princess and This Earth of Mankind open with deliberations about
what it means to be “modern”—a question that for Kartini also is linked to having a
European-style education and to the knowledge of being part of a larger world (see
Letters 3, 4; see also Child of all Nations 182). Pramoedya draws on Kartini when
he focuses on the plight of Native women in a society that condones polygamy and
when he explores a colonial system whose supposed mission is to bring civilization
to the colonies but which in practice does little for colonized women.
In This Earth of Mankind, Nyai Ontosoroh urges Minke to read a novel by the
author G. Francis entitled Nyai Dasima, first published in 1896. She characterizes
it as “a truly European-style novel. But in Malay” (110; see also 75). The fact
that it is written in Malay, in contrast to texts written in Dutch or Javanese, makes
it accessible to the indigenous population.26 Nyai Ontosoroh does not know the
author’s ethnic background but suspects that he is Dutch or Indo-European. Even
today, little is known about the text’s author beyond what she tells us: He was
of English descent and edited various newspapers.27 On one level, Nyai Dasima
can be read as an anti-Islamic tract. The fact that Nyai Dasima has neglected her
Native religion is used as an argument to get her to abandon her master (who is
described as generous and open minded) and daughter and become the second wife
in a polygamous Muslim household; the real reason why she is told to separate
from her European master and her daughter is so that her new husband can take
possession of Nyai Dasima’s wealth. But from a postcolonial perspective, it is
possible to read Nyai Dasima as a sociohistorical analysis of the difficult and
90 Symposium

highly ambiguous situations in which nyais found themselves that translated into
varying and conflicting psychological demands. Nyai Dasima is neither “wife”
nor “servant” (Francis 9) and thus has no status in society. This status of being
in between categories translates into a fundamental material and psychological
insecurity, which, as the text shows, can easily be exploited.
By focusing on Nyai Dasima, This Earth of Mankind acknowledges the legacy
of popular colonial writing in Malay (see also p. 278, where, during the trial fol-
lowing the murder of Herman Mellema, Nyai Dasima is mentioned in the context
of a discussion on the public perception of nyais). Chris GoGwilt characterizes
G. Francis’s text as “an inaugural text for Indonesian literary modernism,”28 and
the point behind this statement is valid: Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet has its roots
in an interest in developing a specific modernist narrative form that engages with
colonial reality. Interestingly, Tirto Adhi Soerjo, the historical figure after whom
Minke is modeled (see fn. 15), and Herman Kommer (1873–1924), a historical
figure as well as a character in the Buru Quartet, both wrote nyai stories following
the success of Francis’s Nyai Dasima. In each of these stories, the sympathy of the
author lies clearly with the nyai and the dilemmas she faces.29 The importance of
the tradition of the nyai narrative for Pramoedya in his Buru Quartet is thematic:
All of these texts articulate an interest in gender as a means to come to a critical
assessment of colonial politics. Furthermore, they promote the idea of the “mod-
ern” as a philosophical principle and as part of a humanistic legacy that defends
the right of people to determine their own fate, regardless of race, ethnicity, or sex.
Finally, there is the aesthetic legacy of these texts as contributions to the develop-
ment of “modernist” literary forms: They question the perception of reality with
which their characters grow up and the values guiding their lives.
In the process of answering the question of how Minke becomes a writer, the
novel also offers a genealogy for modern Indonesian literature that incorporates
the “sociological and psychological” elements Minke considers important (138).
This genealogy is, perhaps surprisingly, located in the border zone of Dutch and
Native writing and is not primarily focused on resurrecting indigenous, precolonial
Indonesian cultural traditions.30 Pheng Cheah speculates that Buru Quartet is
modeled after the European Bildungsroman because in Pramoedya’s text too the
self is alienated from the world, and meaning is no longer self-evident but must
instead be constructed by the novel’s protagonist (Cheah 242, 243)—all of these
conditions make the novel a prototypical modern genre. Beyond that, because of
its hybrid nature and its ability to combine information in many different forms
and from a variety of different sources, the novel lends itself to the kind of
“modern” panoramic overview and critique of society that Pramoedya envisions
(in this respect Multatuli comes the closest to the ideal Pramoedya articulates in
the Buru Quartet). Rather than focusing on developing one specific normative
Modernity in This Earth of Mankind 91

aesthetic model, Minke and Pramoedya’s search for a genealogy of Indonesian

literature stresses that tradition’s ability to borrow from any other traditions it
deems relevant.

INVENTING MODERNITIES

What, then, does Pramoedya’s This Earth of Mankind tell us about the impor-
tance of being “modern”? By emphasizing mobility and gender, and by redefining
the “modern” so that global mobility, gender, and sexuality become its main
agenda, Pramoedya teaches us to see the “modern” differently. What his novels
offer is an archaeology of the idea of the “modern” from a non-Western perspective
that is critical toward both the West and Native culture. The types of knowledge
and the technological and scientific progress associated with Western visions of
the “modern” are deeply embedded in the practice of colonialism. The West may
use the “modern” as part of an image it seeks to project in order to legitimate its
colonial and imperial ambitions as serving the greater good of civilizing the world.
In This Earth of Mankind, however, as in other texts by Pramoedya, the point is
being made that the idea of the “modern” is not necessarily a European privilege.
In fact, Europeans may not at all live up to their own “modern” standards. The
practice at the roots of European conceptualizations of the “modern” is profoundly
antimodern; in the attempt to implement its modern agenda, colonialism turns out
to be deeply hostile toward that agenda. One could speak here of a “performative
contradiction.”31 In spite of his initial good intentions toward Nyai, for instance,
Mr. Mellema’s own actions do much to annihilate the belief in his own ideals.
On the other hand, the “modern”—in particular when thought together with
mobility, gender, and sexuality—represents a potential that has always been
present in Indonesian history. This is particularly clear if one reads This Earth
of Mankind in tandem with other novels by Pramoedya. The Girl from the Coast,
written in the early 1960s before Pramoedya’s arrest by the Suharto regime and
based on the life of his grandmother, also is situated around 1900. But in this novel,
the “modern” perspective on gender relations is represented by people living in
a primitive coastal village, and not by those in the modern city. In the fishing
village, in spite of its lack of electric light, running water, and a judicial system
(to name a few examples), men and women treat each other as equals, while in
the city mansion of a Native aristocrat, the female protagonist is the subject of
numerous, restrictive rules, many of them gender based. The Girl from the Coast
suggests that the “modern” is a potential embedded in Indonesian history but not
always realized.
Another novel Pramoedya wrote on Buru Island, but not part of the Buru Quar-
tet, gives this idea a further historical foundation. Copyright for Arus Balik (The
92 Symposium

Turning Tide) was established in 1979, and the novel was first published in 1995 in
Indonesian and in an authorized Dutch translation (De stroom uit het noorden [The
Stream from the North]). Here Pramoedya turns to early sixteenth-century Java, a
period he interprets as a time of transition and decline for indigenous Indonesian
culture. The appearance of the Portuguese colonizers with their powerful armada
of ships means the end of a culture of trading among indigenous, independent
Indonesian groups. The early sixteenth century is also the period in which Is-
lam starts to replace the older, more eclectic religious traditions of Hinduism and
Buddhism in Indonesia. Significantly, it is never clear whether Arus Balik’s main
protagonist, Wiranggaleng (or, without his title, Galeng), was Muslim, Buddhist,
or Hindu, although he may have had some Buddhist training. He describes himself
as living “outside” of his time and not being able to “stem the great decline” (De
stroom uit het noorden 738). Wiranggaleng is not a member of the aristocratic
class but a simple farmer, exemplary for a time, rapidly disappearing, when men
of modest means could still have meaningful positions in society. It is under the
outside threat of the Portuguese that the aristocracy consolidates its power and
reinforces a system of polygamy (while life in the village in contrast is monog-
amous, as exemplified by the relationship between Idayu and Galeng [see ch. 5,
91–104]).
By citing these two examples from other texts by Pramoedya, I do not mean
to suggest that the author’s intention is to downplay Western contributions to the
discourse of modernity. It is rather so that the “modern” appeals to a potential that
exists, and has existed, also in non-Western societies and cultures. These texts point
out that modernity is not necessarily a European privilege, and they also argue that
there are many models of modernity. It may therefore be more appropriate to speak
of “modernities” rather than “modernity.” Cultures develop in communication with
one another and have done so for a very long time. European numerals are Arabic
in origin, as This Earth of Mankind points out, as is much of Western European
science (215).32 Bill Ashcroft has proposed the term “transformation” to describe
the type of dynamics at work between Europe and its others (13–14). That is in line
with the processes of exchange described in This Earth of Mankind specifically and
in the Buru Quartet as a whole. But it is important to point out that such processes
of exchange and transformation are multilateral. Part of Minke’s learning process
is that he does not only focus on Europe as a model culture but also gets interested
in modern movements in China, Japan, and the Philippines (see Cheah 286). In
subsequent volumes of the Buru Quartet, Minke develops away from the Western-
European models that draw most of his interest in This Earth of Mankind, but his
commitment to modernity remains intact33 and is at least one of the factors that
figure into his life decisions.
Modernity in This Earth of Mankind 93

It is significant that gender and sexuality, and in particular the issue of women’s
rights, are at the core of Pramoedya’s concerns about modernity. This focus be-
speaks a commitment to ideals of human autonomy and emancipation that has the
potential to be at odds with notions of the discursive construction of cultural iden-
tities and cultural relativism often associated with postmodern strains of thinking
within postcolonialism.34 This Earth of Mankind demonstrates that the idea of the
modern can be “used” and “resisted” simultaneously (Ashcroft 23). The novel is
invested in constructing “new conceptions of modernity” (Ashcroft 23), and these
new visions of modernity may very well have a basis, as This Earth of Mankind
also shows, in existing practices outside of the West. These innovative ways of
thinking the “modern” need to reflect a world with multilateral and increasingly
intensified global connections; they need to be based in practice rather than the-
ory; they need to be inclusive; and they need to acknowledge women’s rights and
concerns. In This Earth of Mankind, the modern is a work in progress, a vision that
needs to be adjusted and reimagined continually, rather than something that has
already been accomplished, has taken on its final shape, and has been put behind
us.

Notes
1This is noted for instance by Loomba (16, 96).
2Pramoedya’s limited international experience included a six-month stay in the Netherlands in
1953 as part of a bilateral cultural exchange between Indonesia and the Netherlands, a stay that was
cut short at his own initiative. During the second half of the 1950s, he visited Russia and China.
Not until 1999 was Pramoedya able to go on a European and American tour that coincided with the
English-language publication of his memoirs of Buru Island, The Mute’s Soliloquy. All biographical
information is taken from The Mute’s Soliloquy, Exile, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Essay en interview.
3Pramoedya’s use of the words “military action” (“militaire actie”; see Essay en interview 42)
in this context is intentional, I would argue. The Dutch editors of this volume of interviews added a
footnote to this passage: “What is meant is: police action” (“Bedoeld wordt: politionele actie”; 62,
fn. 9).
4See Hitchcock, in particular his chapter “Meanwhile, on Buru” (140–206), in which he shows
that in the Buru Quartet Indonesian national consciousness emerges in a transnational context.
5See Razif Bahari’s (brief) conversation with Pramoedya Ananta Toer, reported in Bahari (185).
6See Max Lane’s afterword to This Earth of Mankind (363), and also Karolides (492–94).
7I will follow Pramoedya’s practice in This Earth of Mankind and refer to characters the way
they are presented to the readers of the novel with either their nickname, first name, last name, or title:
Minke, for instance, is only referred to with his nickname; Robert and Annelies are referred to only
by their first names; and Nyai Ontosoroh is referred to by her title (Nyai), indicating her social status
in society and where she lives: Ontosoroh (Buitenzorg).
8Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity” 4. For a critical discussion of Habermas’s views
on modernity (including this essay), see d’Entrèves and Benhabib.
9Pheng Cheah also notes similarities between Pramoedya’s thinking and Habermas’s work on
literature in the public sphere (255).
94 Symposium

10See Cheah (273), who speaks in this context of a “comparative gaze” as a crucial stage in
Minke’s development.
11For a history of Indonesia’s technological revolution, see Mrázek. For the introduction of
electricity into households in the Indies, see 87–91; the introduction of photography in the Indies
is discussed on pages 103–110. The book contains an “Epilogue” that examines the importance of
technology in the work of Pramoedya (193–233).
12This term is borrowed from James T. Siegel, who speaks of the “fetish of modernity” as a
means of becoming Dutch for Natives in the Netherlands Indies (158).
13See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, for instance 20–22, 294, 295, 302,
and 303.
14Charles Taylor proposes to distinguish between two fundamental models of conceiving of
“modernity,” one of them being acultural—assuming, like Habermas, that the “modern” is a potential in
all cultures and is more or less identical in these cultures—while the other is a cultural conceptualization
of modernity that sees the modern as a specific achievement of a specific culture, in general that of the
West (172–73). Taylor himself is clearly in favor of a cultural understanding of modernity (175) and
for that reason proposes the term “alternative modernities” (182). Minke’s view of modernity in This
Earth of Mankind is initially acultural, but gradually he comes to realize how the term can function
in the service of specific power interests when cultures interact with each other. In later volumes of
the Buru Quartet, in particular in Footsteps, Minke will argue for a culture-specific understanding of
modernity—approximating Taylor’s model of alternative trajectories for modernity. See in this context
also Susan Stanford Friedman’s proposal that the term modernity’s semantic instability can be a way to
research “unresolved contradictions present and largely repressed in modernity itself” (“Definitional
Excursions” 499).
15This link between modernization and globalization is also clear in Pramoedya’s biography
of the journalist Tirto Adhi Soerjo (1880–1918), one of the models for Minke (something that is
especially clear in the third and fourth volumes of the Buru Quartet). Due to their Western education,
some Natives were able to read about developments in the rest of the world, including the resistance
against colonial powers in North Africa and the Philippines, modern Islamism in Turkey, the war
between Japan and Russia, and more; see Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s biography of Tirto Adhi Soerjo,
De pionier [The Pioneer], 144–45.
16See Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of practice as a power mechanism that evades symbolic legislation
and discursive description but that nevertheless structures societal life (18–22, 81–87).
17See Stoler (48–49). See also Reggie Baay’s recent, very comprehensive Dutch-language study
De njai. Het concubinaat in Nederlands-Indië [The Nyai: Concubinage in the Netherlands Indies], for
instance, 63–64, 74.
18For a summary of these policies, see Hellwig (31–39).
19This negative view of nyais is clear in some of the literature produced at the time by Dutch
authors living in the Indies, even if these authors were politically progressive. See, for instance, Carry
van Bruggen’s novel Goenong-Djatti, first published in 1909 and based on her experiences in the
Netherlands Indies from 1904 to 1907. In this book a nyai murders her former master who has married
a European woman. In the Netherlands, Carry van Bruggen, who was of Jewish descent, was one of
the pioneers of the women’s movement. Another example is the novel Nummer Elf [Number Eleven]
(1889/1893) by the left-leaning Dutch journalist P. A. Daum, in which a nyai murders her master’s new
European wife and escapes unpunished. One explanation for these remarkably negative depictions of
nyais by progressive Dutch authors is that they were more concerned about the status of Dutch and
Indo-European women in the Netherlands Indies than with the plight of Native women. Pramoedya
corrects this image; his novels can be seen as a case of “writing back.”
20Mary Louise Pratt speaks in such cases of a strategy of “anticonquest” through which Western
intellectuals seek to maintain their innocence while simultaneously contributing to European hegemony
(7).
21Read in the context of shifting attitudes toward interracial mixing around 1900, as identified by
Stoler and Baay, one could also see Maurits as the prototypical representative of a new generation that
pushed Europeanism and looked with disdain at the older colonial generations who not only tolerated
Modernity in This Earth of Mankind 95

the institution of concubinage but had based their colonial society on intermarriage, something that
was first problematized by the English during their brief interregnum (1811–16; see Baay 29–32). The
English also spoke out strongly against the practice of slavery that at the time was still very common
in the Netherlands Indies (Baay 30).
22By emphasizing women’s autonomy, Pramoedya is also polemical vis-à-vis the patriarchal
society established under Suharto’s New Order (1965–1998), which celebrated “demure, refined,
male-dependent feminine figures” and disapproved of “sexual licentiousness as well as social and
political assertiveness for women”; see Hatley (146–47).
23The Dutch historian of Indonesian literature A. Teeuw criticizes, incorrectly in my view, This
Earth of Mankind because of its lack of psychology, in particular regarding the development of the
main character (211). In part, I would argue, he comes to this conclusion by ignoring the roles of race,
gender, and sexuality in the psychology of colonialism.
24On Pramoedya’s interest in Multatuli, see Niekerk (58–69). It should not be forgotten in this
context that Multatuli’s Max Havelaar was the first major fictional text to come out of the Netherlands
Indies (see the chronological overview in Beekman; Multatuli is discussed 202–52) and as such had a
foundational function for much of the colonial and anticolonial writing that followed.
25See Kartini (81). Like Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, Kartini’s Letters were at one point part of
world literature. The book went through several editions in English; in 1964, Norton reprinted it with
a preface by Eleanor Roosevelt.
26Regarding the language politics informing Nyai Ontosoroh’s encouragement of Minke to write
in Malay, see Anderson (194–237); Pramoedya is discussed on pp. 218–27.
27See Aveling, “Introduction” 1, in Francis.
28See GoGwilt (414) and also his overview of the many adaptations of the Nyai Dasima
material (414–16). Siegel discusses a 1929 film based on the story, made by an Indies Chinese
firm, Tan’s Film Company (68–75); a Dutch-language version of the story was published in 1926
(56).
29In Herman Kommer’s story, “Nji Paina” (1900), a Native woman is forced to become the nyai
of the European bookkeeper at her father’s place of employment but avenges herself by intentionally
infecting him with smallpox. Pramoedya reprinted this story in Tempo Doeloe (315–29) and also
adapted it in the second volume of the Buru Quartet, Child of all Nations (131–57). In Tirto Adhi
Soerjo’s “De gele geest” [“The Yellow Spirit”] (1906), a nyai and her Dutch master take their revenge
on an Arab merchant, who seeks to seduce her, by cheating him out of 500 guilders; see Maya
Sutedja-Liem’s recently published collection of nyai narratives (49–57, 65–71).
30This choice of a hybrid form of narrating between cultural traditions is to be understood in
the context of Pramoedya’s criticism of the culture of Javanism, which he defines as an attitude of
“unthinking loyalty and obedience to a superior—to any superior” (Exile 85). Pramoedya argues
that there is a need for a new Indonesian culture, because Javanism has too long dominated cultural
production; in addition, it has remained too “provincial” (Exile 87). In line with this call for a
fundamental rethinking of Indonesian culture, in The Mute’s Soliloquy, Pramoedya is critical of the
worldview underlying the Wayang theatre and in particular of its blind adherence to authority, although
one should add that elsewhere in the same volume, Pramoedya points to the critical dimension of
ancient theatre (criticism of the Wayang theatre is a major topic in the letter to his son Yudi [The
Mute’s Soliloquy 237–48]; its critical dimension is discussed on p. 19). One of Pramoedya’s early
texts is an adaptation of an ancient tale with similarly critical intentions (The King, the Witch, and the
Priest: A Twelfth-Century Javanese Tale, first published in Indonesian in 1951). Razif Bahari proposes
Bakhtin’s notion of “dialogism” for an understanding of the history of the Indonesian novel in general
and of the Buru Quartet in particular (91). Because of its dialogic relation to tradition, the novel can
function as a “synthesis of protest and imitation,” of “revolt and conciliation” (95).
31On this Habermasian notion, see Matustik (146).
32In this context, see also Susan Stanford Friedman’s suggestion that scholarship move away from
Eurocentric definitions of “modernity” to foreground instead the term’s “intercultural” dimensions
(“Definitional Excursions” 507). See also her arguments for a “polycentric, planetary concept of
modernity that can be both precise enough to be useful and yet capacious enough to encompass the
96 Symposium

divergent articulations of modernity in various geohistorical locations” (“Periodizing Modernism”

433). See also Taylor’s proposal to speak of “alternative modernities” (182; see also fn. 14).
33The beginning of the third volume of Buru Quartet, Footsteps, reiterates Minke’s commitment
to modernity but in a far more ironic way than in This Earth of Mankind (Footsteps 15–16).
34Pramoedya’s novels mirror the discomfort of some feminist theorists with (poststructuralist
and postmodern) theories of the discursive construction of cultural identities; see for instance Judith
Butler’s notion of performativity (2–3, 5, 15), and Leslie A. Adelson’s theory of positionality (19–20,
60–64).

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Carl Niekerk is Professor of Germanic languages, comparative and world literature, and Jewish
studies at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. His teaching and research interests include
modern and contemporary German and Austrian literature, the history of anthropology, music and
literature, and comparative Dutch studies. This essay came forth from a general education course he
teaches at the University of Illinois on the history of sexuality in its Western and non-Western contexts.