in my bottom. I felt my head. It was not slippery. That meant there was no blood. Only a small wound. I was not going to die. I went underwater again. As I did so, I noticed they were coming after me in boats. I don’t know how many of them there were. But the first boat overturned, and the second had to help them. So I managed to get away. I was near a village, and I hid amongst the sago palms.
NOTES
Preface
1. On 28 March 1963 President Sukarno issued Decree No. 53/1963 recognizing Tan Malaka as a hero of national independence (for a complete text of this decree see Introduction, n. 93). The tenuousness of this belated recognition is indicated by the fact that no monuments or highways bear his name: I have found only an alleyway in South Jakarta and a back street in Padang. Tan Malaka is yet to be the subject of any of the myriad biographies of heroes published in Indonesia.
2. Sekolah Rakyat (People’s School). For details of these schools, the first of which was established by Tan Malaka in Semarang in 1921, see Volume I, pp. 58-59.
3. Persatuan Perjuangan (Struggle Front): the name of the united front established by Tan Malaka in January 1946 to advocate the course of perjuangan (struggle) for the Indonesian revolution, as opposed to the course of diplomasi (diplomacy) pursued by the government. For details see Volume III, chapters 9 to 14.
4. For details of the Partai Murba, see below, pp. cxiii-cxv. For discussion of the term murba and its relationship to the term “proletariat,” see below pp. xci-xcv.
5. For details on this romantic body of literature relating to Tan Malaka, see below, pp. lxxii-lxxiii
6. See, for instance, his farewell to Hong Kong, Volume II, p. 52.
7. PARI (Partai Republik Indonesia: Republic of Indonesia party). This was the political party founded by Tan Malaka in June 1927, following the destruction of the PKI in the wake of the 1926-1927 uprisings (see Jarvis, Partai Republik Indonesia (PARI), and Poeze, Tan Malaka, chapter 10).
8. Letter from Hasan Sastraatmadja, 3 October 1981. According to Paramita Abdurrachman, Tan Malaka was a proficient typist and used a Baby Hermes. She herself typed the manuscript of Madilog and recalls typing some episodes from Tan Malaka’s life story, presumably sections of this text, although she does not recall the details (interview, Sydney, 26 May 1982).
9. Interviews with Paramita Abdurrachman, Jakarta, 24 October 1972, and Sydney, 26 May 1982.
10. See Poeze, Tan Malaka, pp. 416-17. This point has been subsequently pursued in personal discussions and correspondence. Poeze (letter, 19 December 1980) quotes Panghulu Lubis of Yogyakarta (who apparently was involved in the publication of the stencilled versions of Tan Malaka’s writings) to the effect that Tan Malaka saw the published books and that it is not possible that any substantial part was lost. I stand by my interpretation of the lacuna.
11. Discussion in Jakarta, September 1980; Tan Malaka, Thesis.
12. Suzuki, “The List of Writings of Tan Malaka.”
13. In referring to the different editions I have used the following codes: Solo, Wakaf Republik, Widjaya and DT (copy with Djamaluddin’s annotations).
14. This widespread occurrence of poor typography was hardly surprising in a country experiencing revolution and occupation and emerging from a period of wartime scarcity of resources. With Jakarta under Dutch control through much of the revolutionary period, even less access to existing printing facilities was available to the burgeoning number of political writers anxious to get their ideas into print. Lack of skilled personnel only exacerbated the situation.
15. Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, pp. 150-62.
16. Robert Halsbrand, “Editing the Letters of Letter-Writers,” in Art and Error: Modem Textual Editing, ed. Ronald Gottesman and Scott Bennett (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 130.
17. Here discussed only as regards the problems of translation. For further comment on Tan Malaka’s use of language and his style, see below, pp. xxxiv-xxxvi.
18. For an exposition of various issues involved in the development of modern Indonesian, see Alisjahbana, Language Planning for Modernization, esp. pp. 66 and 90-91 on affix differentiation.
19. Figures of the literacy rate in the 1940s are not available, but the 1930 census estimated literacy in the roman script on Java to be at 6.5 percent. Considerable advances were made after that date, particularly the mass basic education campaigns during the Japanese occupation. Nevertheless, it is incontestable that the audience for a book such as this represented a small segment of the population consisting of people who had received a formal education, generally including some Dutch language instruction, or those who had come to literacy and political consciousness through the nationalist movement, which used Dutch terminology for abstract and modern concepts not catered to in the traditional Malay language from which Indonesian was developing. Some of these Dutch terms were later assimilated into Indonesian (e.g., nasionalisme, partai, fakultas). Others were replaced by new Indonesian terms (e.g., djoernalis by wartawan, bibliotheek by perpustakaan) (see Alisjahbana, Language, esp. pp. 67-81).
Introduction
1. Aslia was Tan Malaka’s term, coined to express the future political entity combining Southeast Asia and northern Australia. For details of this concept see below, pp. xcvi-xcix.
2. Soetomo, Kenang-kenangan, p. 6, cited in Benedict Anderson, “A Time of Darkness and a Time of Light: Transposition in Early Indonesian Nationalist Thought,” in Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia, ed. Reid and Marr, p. 224.
3. While we have no direct evidence that Tan Malaka read Pellico’s work, the combination of his voracious appetite for reading and the popularity of the book as a political romance and as an inspiration for those resisting authority make it likely that he did, possibly during his frequent browsings in the bookshop near where he lived in Haarlem in 1915-1916. Since its first publication in 1832 it has averaged six Italian editions a year. It was translated into a number of European languages, including Dutch in 1841 (Sylvio Pellico, My Prisons).
Pellico was arrested in 1920 and charged with being a member of the Carbonari, one of the secret societies aiming to drive the Austrian authorities out of Italy. The group organized a number of uprisings between 1815 and 1848. Pellico’s involvement with the Carbonari was short-lived and marginal. Activists in the group criticized his book for its meek Christian resignation to suffering.
4. See Benedict Anderson, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,” and Taufik Abdullah, “Modernization in the Minangkabau World: West Sumatra in the Early Decades of the Twentieth Century,” both in Claire Holt, Culture and Politics in Indonesia; for a discussion of the concept as it relates to Tan Malaka and the Minangkabau culture, see Rudolf Mrázek, “Tan Malaka: A Political Personality’s Structure of Experience.”
5. Shelly Errington, “Some Comments on Style in the Meanings of the Past,” in Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia, ed. Reid and Marr, pp. 31, 36. It might be noted here that there is another explanation for the repetition in the text of From Jail to Jail. As mentioned above (Preface, pp. xi-xii), it seems likely that Tan Malaka wrote the text in sections and, under prison conditions, probably did not have the chance to look back over his previous work, already sent out of the jail for safekeeping.
6. Errington, “Some Comments,”
