Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (54 page)

In another film-set village, we spotted a man walking along with a fat bamboo cylinder hanging off either end of a carrying pole that bounced over his shoulder. On one side he’d hung a full jerrycan. To counter-balance it on the other side he’d slung a jack-fruit, freshly cut with the large machete that was strapped to the small of his back. We followed him home.

This gentleman’s bamboo cylinders and jerrycan were filled with sap which he had just collected from the aren trees. ‘Try it, it’s delicious!’ he insisted. His wife dipped a glass into the tube. It came out filled with a viscous piss-coloured liquid in which floated a couple of dead bees and other unidentifiable detritus. She held it out to Evi, who looked queasy. I took the glass and drank. It was warmish, sweetish, undistinguished.

The gentleman we intercepted sold his sugar at 17,000 rupiah a kilo, but he had no stock. He directed us to a nearby village. There we found a beautiful girl in a red blouse sitting on a porch, brushing out her waist-length hair: it was a scene from a Zhang Yimou film. But as soon as she heard what we wanted, she lost her languor. She flicked her hair into a bun, and turned businesslike. Yes, she had sugar; yes, it was top quality. In the dirt-floored kitchen, the chicken that was scratching around under a huge bamboo bell-jar did not look at the chicken that was being plucked for the pot. We inspected the sap bubbling over a wood-fired stove. After six or seven hours it would be poured into bowls to set. We turned over smooth, firmly compacted cakes of sugar in our hands. Evi agreed that it was top quality. Could the girl rustle up fifty kilos of it?

Yes. And the price? Twenty thousand a kilo. No, said Evi, not the retail price, the wholesale price. Twenty thousand, replied the Girl with the Long Hair. Evi and Sanna both started in on her in rapid-fire Javanese, with Evi every now and then shaking her head and repeating in Indonesian, ‘At that price, Jakarta won’t take it.’ She offered 18,000. The next step in the negotiation was obviously to make tea, fry up bananas, and go through a lot of polite chit-chat. I went for a walk around the village. The Girl with the Long Hair went off and collected fifty kilos of sugar from various households. They started weighing it up, suspending it in batches off a scale the like of which I had seen in many rural kitchens in Indonesia: a tilted rod, a large hook, and a sliding brass weight. The girl still insisted on 20,000 a kilo. Last price. No discussion.

Evi’s husband began another complicated game on his phone. The cousin-driver smoked. All the wheeling and dealing, the polite chit-chat and hard-edged ultimatums came from the mouths of women. It mirrored what I had found in more domestic situations elsewhere in Indonesia: the people in formal positions of power – the bupatis, the village heads, the religious leaders, the shamans – were all men. But it was usually the women who actually decided how many buffalo would be slaughtered, which rice fields would be sold off, which of the children would go to college.

As the negotiations dragged on, I went for another walk, stopping to chat with a group of women who were peeling onions for Indofood, the makers of Indomie noodles. They were paid 500 rupiah a kilo, peeled weight – five cents. The quickest workers could do ten kilos in a day. When I came back, Evi’s husband was loading the sugar into the car. How much did you pay? I asked Evi, in English. ‘Eighteen, of course. Poor girl, she’s never had a sale this big before, she doesn’t know the difference between retail and wholesale.’

The margins of business here were every bit as slim as among the tuna fishermen in Northern Sulawesi. But in Java goods seemed to pass through even more pairs of hands, racking up a few cents each time. On the one hand, you might argue that these tiny margins illustrate the efficiencies of a competitive market. On the other hand, they might just reflect the fact that in Java, time (and thus labour) is valued at practically nil. The Girl with the Long Hair would make around five dollars for two hours of chatting, bargaining and frying bananas. Evi would make twice that before costs, which would be absorbed by piggy-backing this on our next mission, the avocados.

It didn’t seem much until I did the maths on the onion ladies. They were earning fifty cents a day.

Earlier on my travels I had crossed paths with Ahmad Tohari, one of Indonesia’s most famous writers. He had invited me to visit him at home when I got to Java. So from the avocado-growing area of Bandungan, I headed south-west towards Tinggarjaya, a small town in the Banyumas region of Central Java. By the time I reached him I was in shock.

Quite by chance, I had hopped on a bus run by the Efisiensi chain. There were no sick bags hanging from the ceiling. There were no chickens in the luggage rack. There were no cracks in the windscreen held together by stickers of reclining nurses bursting from their bikinis. In place of the bus lout with spiky mullet hair, Monster Mash shorts and Attitude was a smiling girl in a neatly pressed uniform who brought me a bottle of cold water and an individually wrapped bun filled with red bean paste. I had a comfortable seat all to myself, for the whole trip. If I wanted to watch the video that played on the drop-down screens overhead, I could use the earphones provided. Otherwise, I could enjoy the silence: no dangdut even. The bus stopped at designated times in designated places, all of which had rows of sparklingly clean loos. We didn’t break down once, or go off-piste to visit the driver’s auntie. And the whole journey, covering a couple of hundred kilometres, cost all of 50,000 rupiah, about a quarter of what I had paid in other islands to cover the same distance in a rust-bucket filled with sacks of rice and trussed-up goats. Java was definitely different.

I found Pak Tohari sitting with his grandson and a couple of young journalists on the veranda of his house. He was dressed for Friday prayers, in a simple sarong and a striped shirt. He asked about my recent travels and soon I was telling him about Pak Askiman, the forthright Dayak who ran the Department of Public Works in Sintang and who had been less than complimentary about Indonesia’s Javanese rulers.

‘The Javanese colonized us with their mentality,’ the Dayak had said. ‘For them there is only one right way, and that is to do whatever the boss wants, whether or not he meets your needs.’ The first task of decentralization, in Pak Askiman’s view, was to throw off this mentality. ‘People will always try to please the boss, of course,’ he had said. ‘But in our culture, we have a right to expect something back.’

I asked Pak Tohari if he thought Javanese culture was really so hierarchical.

He pointed to the road which ran in front of us. His wife’s mother grew up in this house, he said, and when she was a girl, the adipati would sometimes pass by in his carriage. The adipati was a sort of super-bupati. Though he was actually a glorified servant of the Dutch, he behaved like a sultan. His carriage would be preceded by retainers who would march along ringing bells. ‘When they heard the bells, everyone would have to rush out of their houses and bow down at the side of the road. They weren’t even allowed to look at the adipati, they were forbidden to raise their faces to the sun.’ Pak Tohari shook his head in a sort of disgusted amazement. ‘That was in the 1940s, mind you. The 1940s!’

The writer spoke heatedly of the cancerous effect of this kind of feudalism, which he said was most firmly entrenched in the courts of Yogyakarta and Solo, further east. He pointed to the language of the sultanate towns, with their fine gradations of respect. The young journalists that were with us nodded sagely; they were helping Pak Tohari with a magazine intended to revive the much more egalitarian form of Javanese spoken in Banyumas.

It dawned on me for the first time that ‘Javanese’ is almost as slippery a term as ‘Indonesian’. I had been throwing it around too casually. I did make a distinction between the Javanese and the Sundanese, who live in West Java, speak a completely different language, and even drink their tea without sugar. West of them again sat the people of Banten; they sold themselves around the archipelago as faith healers and these days do a roaring trade in penis enlargement. But I had always thought that pretty much anyone who spoke Javanese as their first language – most of the 73 million people who live in the eastern two-thirds of the island – could fairly be described as sharing ‘Javanese culture’.

Pak Tohari set me straight. Banyumas culture is less snobby and hierarchical than the Yogyakarta/Solo brand of Javanese, he said. It was the two courts right in the centre of the island that had, over the centuries, infected the country with a crippling bowing-and-scraping, the writer believed, as well as an obsessive concern for form over substance. Once the sultans had become paid functionaries of the Dutch and had no real politics to occupy them, descendants of rival princes codified all of their historical rivalries into tiny variations in the way a dancer bent her fingers back, or in the colour of batik that a prince of a certain rank was allowed to wear.

I had encountered this concern for form way back in 1989, when Reuters sent me to cover the Sultan of Yogyakarta’s coronation. Sukarno, who considered most sultans to be lackeys of the Dutch, had allowed their courts to fall into a coma after independence. But the Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX had stood up firmly for the republic against his Dutch paymasters, and his court had stayed very much alive. The beloved Sultan died in 1988; now his son was taking his place on the throne of the central Javanese city.

We had to wear court dress to get into the palace. When I emerged from my hotel room in a sarong and a long, fitted kebaya blouse, the Reuters photographer Enny was waiting for me. Her hair was swept up into a traditional bun, enlarged by a huge fake
konde
hairpiece hung about with jasmine flowers. She was wearing a sarong in a white and brown design typical of Yogya, and a brocade kebaya. The look would have been perfect Javanese lady of high society, but for the two huge Nikon cameras slung across the kebaya like ammunition belts. I laughed.

Enny, on seeing me, did not laugh at all. ‘You can’t wear that!’ Apparently, the batik that I had chosen was from Solo, another central Javanese sultanate with a
kraton
, or palace, about an hour’s drive away. It had split from Yogya in the late eighteenth century and they had been at their culture wars ever since. Wearing a Solo batik to a Yogya coronation would have been like going to a royal wedding in Britain wearing a pair of knickers on my head. I changed.

Tens of thousands of people crushed the streets of Yogyakarta to watch the new Sultan pass by. He was in a horse-drawn carriage garlanded with jasmine flowers and topped with a giant gilded crown. Above the carriage twirled a golden umbrella which is the Sultan’s badge of office. Within the palace complex, his passage was preceded by a procession of faithful retainers in a succession of unlikely uniforms. There were musketeers in Smurf hats carrying colonial-era rifles, a troupe of red-jacketed drummers with Napoleonic tricorns, a phalanx of spear-carriers in black stovepipe hats. The palace women carried peacock-feather fans and marched in various permutations of breast-cloth, brocade and batik which doubtless spoke volumes about their status. (In earlier, more polygamous times, the Sultan would indicate which of his wives he wished to have ‘serve’ him on any given day by sending her a breast-cloth bordered with the triangular mountain motif.) A group of dwarves and albinos, and even one or two albino dwarves, formed part of the procession; they strutted along in truncated sarongs and shiny red fezzes, bare-chested, apparently adding to the Sultan’s power.

The Sultan himself, a modern man who later chaired the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and fancied himself a candidate for President of Indonesia, sat on a throne on a raised dais. He wore a black velvet jacket encrusted with golden threadwork and a long string of pearls. A huge starburst of diamonds glittered on his chest. He sat absolutely expressionless as hundreds of courtiers prostrated themselves before him. The more aristocratic were allowed to raise themselves to kiss his knee.

Now, a quarter of a century later, sultanates are being revived across the land, part of the explosion of interest in local identities. When the Sultan of Solo invited his neighbours from Yogya over for a Kraton Festival in 1995, it was largely a local affair. In 2012 the sultanate of Buton in Bau-Bau hosted representatives from 120 kratons around Indonesia. I had visited a few of these ‘palaces’ – most were dilapidated wooden buildings filled with crispy photos of past glory. Comparing their incumbents to the Sultan of Yogyakarta was like comparing some exiled Mittel-European royal living in a bedsit in North London to Queen Elizabeth II.