Rifle Reports: A Story of Indonesian Independence

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Rifle Reports

Rifle Reports

A Story of Indonesian Independence

Mary Margaret Steedly

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley·Los Angeles·London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Steedly, Mary Margaret, 1946–.

Rifle reports : a story of Indonesian independence / Mary Margaret Steedly.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27486-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-27487-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN 978-0-520-95528-8

1. Indonesia—History—Revolution, 1945–1949—Personal narratives, Indonesian. 2. Sumatera Utara (Indonesia)—History. 3. Karo-Batak (Indonesian people)—History.I. Title.

DS644.S732013

959.803'5—dc23

2012047748

Manufactured in the United States of America

21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a 30% postconsumer waste, recycled, deinked fiber that is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all ANSI/NISO (Z 39.48) requirements.

This book is dedicated, with respect and

admiration, to all the eager girls and daring boys

of Karoland’s 1945 generation, who imagined

independence in myriad ways and saw how it

turned out.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Technical Notes

Introduction: The Outskirts of the Nation

1.The Golden Bridge

2.Buried Guns

3.Imagining Independence

4.Eager Girls

5.Sea of Fire

6.Letting Loose the Water Buffaloes

7.The Memory Artist

Conclusion: The Sense of an Ending

Appendix 1: List of Informants

Appendix 2: Glossary and Abbreviations

Appendix 3: Time Line

Notes

References

Index of Cited Informants

General Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

1.Ceremonial gateway, North Sumatra, 1995

2.National Heroes’ Memorial Park, Kabanjahé, 1994

3.Nurses Muli beru Sebayang and Tiolina boru Pasaribu with friends, near the village of Pernantin, May 1, 1949

4.Northern Karo plateau, with Mount Sinabun in the background

5.Batu Karang, one of the largest villages in the Karo highlands, c. 1925

6.Piah Malem beru Manik with companions. Pergendangen, Taneh Karo, 1949

7.Kin group dancing at Selamat Ginting’s funeral. Kuta Bangun, April 25, 1994

8.Young Karo woman in Kuta Pinang, 1904

9.Selamat Ginting and Piah Malem beru Karo-Karo Manik, c. 1955

10.Pro-independence rally on the Medan esplanade, October 6, 1945

11.Youth style, 1940s

12.Youth style, 1990s

13.Cover art, Kebangoenan (February 1947)

14.Once the sails are unfurled, we cannot retreat. Independence Day billboard, Medan, 1995

15.Mrs. Van den Berg with a group of CMCM girls, c. 1935

16.Going places: Srikandi girls

17.Dark billows shading our charred villages. Detail, Independence Day billboard, Kabanjahé, 1994

18.Ruins of an old Karo house, Mardinding, 1994

19.Cover illustration, Medan Area comic book

20.Indonesian refugees at Sei Ular

21.Karo gendang ensemble, 1994

MAPS

1.North Sumatra

2.Taneh Karo, North Sumatra

3.Dutch troop movements, July 27–August 3, 1947

4.The journey told in Sinek’s song

Acknowledgments

The fieldwork on which this project is based was conducted in Indonesia over a total of fourteen months between 1993 and 1995. Most of this time was spent in North Sumatra Province, in the city of Medan and its outskirts or the highland district of Tanah Karo. Fieldwork was funded through the generous support of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Harvard University Clark and Tozier Funds, all of which I acknowledge with gratitude.

Research was conducted under the auspices of Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia (LIPI, the Indonesian Institute of Science). At LIPI, my special thanks go to Drs. Kalam Sebayang, who not only saw my proposal through the review process in record time but also introduced me to several key informants in Jakarta. My research sponsor was the late professor Masri Singarimbun, of Gajah Mada University, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. I was accompanied in this research by research assistants Jabatin Bangun, Fariana beru Bangun, Julianus Limbeng, Sri Alem beru Sembiring, and Satria Sembiring Pandia, all of whom contributed in important ways to this project.

My deepest thanks go to the men and women who shared their memories of life during wartime with us. I will not forget the warmth of their hospitality and the richness of their recollections. This may not be exactly the story they would have told of that extraordinary time, but I hope that they and their families recognize the sincere admiration for their aspirations and the sympathy for their hardships with which I have shaped my version of it.

During my first period of research in Karoland, in the mid-1980s, I was formally adopted by a Karo family, Bapa Petrus Sitepu and Nandé Petrus beru Ginting, of Jalan Dr. Sofyan in Medan. I returned to the Sitepu household in the 1990s, enjoying the companionship of my now-grownup siblings, Petrus, Nova, Cici, and Ninin. All of them helped with this project; more important, they made my time in Medan fun. Sadly, both Petrus and Bapa Petrus have passed away since then.

An all-important early write-up year was spent at the Bunting (now Radcliffe) Institute, where the supportive, interdisciplinary environment contributed to my initial formulation of the ideas in this book. I appreciate this opportunity and thank the fellows as well as the ever-helpful staff and administrators, especially Judith Vichniac and Florence Ladd, whose vision of an intellectual refuge nurtured so many women. Toward the end of the writing process I enjoyed a different kind of respite during a sabbatical year spent in Charlottesville, Virginia. The red house there was a wonderful country retreat that connected me to memories of Karoland and to the comfort of family and friends.

Thanks are due Benedict Anderson, Sepideh Bajracharya, Steve Caton, Webb Keane, Michael Herzfeld, Nancy Florida, Julie Kleinman, Smita Lahiri, James Siegel, Patricia Spyer, Karen Strassler, and Tinuk and Philip Yampolsky, all of whom read parts (or all) of the manuscript and made useful suggestions and corrected errors. Philip helped especially with the material on Karo music in chapter 7 and was always quick to provide an obscure reference, a bad pun, or a grammatical correction. Ken George, as always, deserves much gratitude for his wit and generosity. Over the years his friendship has been steadfast, and I am sure I have inadvertently stolen some of my best lines from him. As fellow Indonesianists at Harvard, Byron and Mary-Jo Good have been supportive and enthusiastic over the long time it has taken to complete this book. Special thanks also go to Steve Caton, who suggested the subtitle. Numerous students have contributed in ways large and small to this project; my debts to them are so many that I must, with apologies, simply issue a blanket expression of gratitude. I am grateful for the two anonymous readers for the press, whose serious engagement with my manuscript has saved me from numerous errors and whose suggestions have made this a much better book than it would otherwise have been. Thanks also to Illiana Quimbaya, who provided a critical piece of information on very short notice. Errors and infelicities that remain are, of course, my own responsibility.

At the University of California Press, editor Stan Holwitz began the process of shepherding this book to completion; Reed Malcolm took over down the road. Thanks to Stan for his faith in this project and to Reed for taking it on, after all this time. I would also like to thank acquisitions coordinator Stacy Eisenstark and senior editor Suzanne Knott.

Julia Yezbick and Denise Waddington helped prepare the images, and Peter Gueth prepared the maps, with a last-minute assist from Troy Liston. An earlier version of chapter 7 appeared as Modernity and the Memory Artist: The Work of Imagination in Highland Sumatra, in Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 4 (2000): 811–46, and is reproduced here with permission of Cambridge University Press.

Finally, my most heartfelt gratitude goes to my mother, Margaret Steedly Hemingway, and my brother, John Wesley Steedly, for their patience and support, and for the special warmth of homecoming.

Technical Notes

ON LANGUAGE

Bahasa Indonesia is a modified version of Malay, the native language of the coastal populations of parts of Sumatra, Borneo, and the Malay Peninsula. Malay also served as a maritime lingua franca throughout the region, both before and during the period of Dutch colonial rule. However, it was not until the post–World War II proclamation of national independence that bahasa Indonesia gained much purchase beyond the multiethnic cities and ports of the archipelago. Only in the last decades have mass literacy, the expansion of state bureaucracy, and a greatly enlarged media footprint made the notion of Indonesian as a common national language more than an aspiration. In the 1990s, when most of these interviews were conducted, my informants were likely to be more comfortable speaking cakap (bahasa) Karo or else a hybrid combination of Karo and Indonesian.

The Karo language is one of a group of related, though more or less mutually unintelligible, languages of the Sumatran uplands classified as Batak. Karo is lexically closer to Malay than are the other Batak languages, though these are mutually unintelligible as well. They share a basic syntactic structure and some cognate words, which do not always coincide semantically. My informants regularly moved back and forth between Karo and vernacular Indonesian. Except where it seemed especially relevant to the content or context of the story, I have not indicated such code switching in the translated text. While it might be linguistically illuminating to explore this in more detail, I felt that fully notating interviews in this way would detract from the sense—and the artistry—of my informants’ accounts. Where necessary, I have inserted bracketed notations to indicate the language being used, as for example bapa [K., father] or bapak [I., father, sir]. In translated sources, both written and oral, words that are foreign to the language of the original are italicized, as in the following statement, in which the speaker switched back and forth between English and Indonesian: "To be a good wife, to be a good, whatever, member of society." Similarly, I use italics to indicate song lyrics and poetry embedded in my text.

Pronunciation of both languages is similar. Karo is said to be more melodic, with heavier stress placed on accented syllables. I have indicated in Karo, but not in Indonesian, the acute e (é) but otherwise in both languages follow the conventions of the new orthography adopted in 1972 (e.g., maju rather than madjoe). The only exception to this is for some proper names and for quotations dated prior to 1972.

ON NAMES AND TERMS OF ADDRESS

Karo society is composed of five patrilineal megaclans, or merga, each of which is further divided into a number of subclans (also known as merga). Either the clan or the subclan name may be used as a surname, though certain conventional usages are broadly adhered to. For instance, a man of merga Ginting Suka would never be referred to merely by his subclan designation Suka, whereas it would be quite unusual for a man of merga Perangin-angin Bangun to use anything more than the subclan name Bangun. Women are not regarded as properly having a clan name and are referred to as a woman of (beru) their natal patriclan, for example, beru Ginting, beru Bangun.

Karo generally avoid the use of personal names for reference or address, using instead either clan nicknames, kin terms, polite euphemisms, or teknonyms. After the birth of a couple’s first child, they are referred to as the father of (bapa) and mother of (nandé) the child. Perhaps because of the sense of social freedom and equality of the time, my informants from the Generation of 1945 tended to be more casual in this regard. Some adhered to the conventional forms of address and reference, but others were comfortable with the use of personal names. I follow my informants’ example here and use the name by which they referred to themselves or by which others referred to them.

Kinship terms are given in the standard anthropological abbreviations, as follows:

In combination, terms should be read sequentially, for example, MB = mother’s brother (K., mama). It should be noted that Karo use these terms to indicate a specific kinsperson or to designate a person belonging to a general kin category.

INTRODUCTION

The Outskirts of the Nation

Each year on August 17 the highland town of Kabanjahé, like every other district seat in Indonesia, celebrates the proclamation of national independence. Banners, billboards, and strings of electric lights decorate the broad main streets. Perjuangan (struggle) and Merdeka! (independence), the keywords of nationalist mobilization, appear everywhere, from cigarette advertisements to T-shirts. Freshly painted gateways at the entrances of side streets and public buildings mark off national time in red-stenciled numerals: on the left side, 17–8-45, the date of the independence proclamation, and on the right, 17–8 of the present year (figure 1). Schoolchildren begin practicing their parade routines weeks in advance.

Kabanjahé is the capital of Tanah Karo (I., Karoland), an administrative district in North Sumatra Province. It is ordinarily the kind of place that travelers pass through on their way to somewhere else. All the main roads that cross the Karo plateau meet in Kabanjahé, spinning off the market square in pinwheel formation. Long-distance transportation is funneled through the terminal on the edge of town, but all the local buses pick up passengers at designated spots around this central square. Villagers returning from the market or from a visit with city-dwelling grandchildren, or on their way to a wedding or funeral, cluster on the street corners or loiter in the coffee shops, waiting for their bus and exchanging news. This is where you can pick up the latest gossip about deaths, marriages, scandals, and school admissions. Students going home for the weekend and young people heading to rural harvest festivals shed their cultivated urbanisms—Jakarta slang, languid gestures—as they mix with these inquisitive commuters.

FIGURE 1. Ceremonial gateway, North Sumatra, 1995. Photo by the author.

Tanah Karo is a prosperous farming district, and Kabanjahé is the site of its largest retail market. On Mondays—the traditional market day—the town is still flooded with shoppers, but now the market is open every day, and Mondays have lost much of their special excitement. The market itself is an open-air maze of stalls packed with the everyday necessities and cheap treats of rural life. The entire complex forms a square enclosure bounded by a wall of street-side shops, each side pierced by a gateway of grim, black-thatched towers. Cabbages, pineapples, leeks, and bananas spill out from these gates and onto the adjacent streets and sidewalks, where they share space with plasticware, cheap clothing, and locally made products, such as brooms, rice winnowers, knives and machetes, rattan baskets, cylinders of palm sugar, brass pesticide-spray tanks, bird cages, and bamboo spoons.¹

The town of Kabanjahé got its start shortly after the turn of the century as a Dutch colonial subdistrict station and mission post. Government offices, courts, medical facilities, schools, and churches were soon followed by auto repair shops, restaurants, retail stores, and even a movie theater, but aside from an annual livestock fair and horse race there was little in the town to interest Europeans. The cool highland climate was an invigorating change from the equatorial swelter of the lowland plantation zone, but Dutch visitors preferred to stay in the nearby resort town of Berastagi. These Dutch people didn’t like Kabanjahé, one woman told me. They liked Berastagi better. So that’s where they built their houses, Dutch houses, with the tile roofs. Berastagi offered dramatic vistas of wide skies and smoking volcanoes, photos of which adorned many a European traveler’s album. There is no view in Kabanjahé except of cornfields.

Not many signs of colonial days remain in Kabanjahé, for much of the town was burned to the ground in 1947 by retreating nationalist fighters. Rebuilt after the war, its public buildings owe more to the no-frills internationalist architecture of the 1950s and the plain, unadorned style favored by the Karo Protestant Church than to either the white-columned grandiosity of urban colonial architecture or the cozy charm of Berastagi’s shuttered bungalows and flower gardens. Like the market gates, newer government buildings are supplemented with the conventional ornaments of Karo architecture: high-pitched, multigabled rooflines, sometimes shaggily thatched; brightly colored gable insets woven with traditional designs; auspicious images of the lizardlike spirit- messenger beraspati zigzagging along the walls; and on guard from each roof peak the black, arching profile of the wild ox.

Although it has small but established communities of Chinese and Javanese residents and its civil servants may come from all over the province, Kabanjahé is a self-consciously Karo town. This identity has been actively fostered both by the district government and by the Karo Protestant Church, which has long been the self-styled defender not just of Karo manners and morals but of language and culture as well. The church’s headquarters are here, and its influential presence has stamped the entire town with an industrious Calvinist respectability. The comfortable present-day fit between Protestant ethic and Karo custom was, so to speak, tailored in Kabanjahé.²

Most of the time the town bears its place in the nation lightly. Many of the stores and cafés that line the streets have Indonesian names, but Karo, rather than Indonesian, is the language of the streets, the shops, the churches, and even the government offices. Radio shops have about equal numbers of Karo and Indonesian music recordings on display, as well as some Western selections, but Karo pop is mostly what you hear on the streets.

A stranger who has traveled elsewhere in North Sumatra will notice a special politesse in Kabanjahé, which is a result of the Karo assumption that even strangers may turn out to be relatives. Westerners here are not the oddities that they seem in villages farther off the beaten path, but neither are they a significant source of income. Bus conductors and pedestrians will try to shoo out-of-place tourists back to Berastagi or direct them to the traditional village of Lingga, assuming they’ve lost their way, but a word or two in Karo invites responses of courtesy and delight and messages to be delivered to distant kinfolk living somewhere over in the West. In short, Kabanjahé doesn’t just fit into family networks; it runs on them: you go to your auntie’s market booth to buy sugar or oranges, and you take your uncle’s bus back to the village; you meet a sister-in-law on her way to a ceremony and learn the news of long-unseen relatives; you carry a letter for a homesick niece or a prescription for an ailing grandmother. These are the everyday expectations of a persistently local sort of place, one that, without diminishing its enthusiasm for education, technology, and other modern opportunities, looks more to the surrounding highland villages than to the cities of the lowlands for its cultural standards.

But on August 17 Kabanjahé’s standard is the nation. At the soccer stadium on the edge of town, schoolkids, scout troops, civil servants, soldiers, elderly veterans, and casual spectators assemble for the morning’s official flag ceremony. Just as it happens throughout Indonesia—as it has happened every year since 1945—precisely at 9:00 A.M. the bupati (district head of government) reads the familiar words, in their familiar, rhythmic intonation: Pro-kla-ma-si. Ka-mi bangsa In-do-né-sia . . .

Proclamation. We the Indonesian people hereby declare Indonesia’s independence. Matters concerning the transfer of power and other matters will be executed in an orderly manner and in the shortest possible time.

Jakarta, dated 17–8-05³

In the name of the Indonesian people,

Soekarno — Hatta

The flag raising follows immediately. A white-uniformed drill team composed of student representatives of all the district’s high schools marches to the reviewing stand, where an heirloom duplicate flag is presented to one of its members. She (for on every such occasion that I have witnessed the flag’s recipient has been female) then delivers the Grand Old Red-and-White (Sang Saka Merah-Putih) to the team of four, who perform the actual raising of the flag. Once the sergeant-at-arms has formally reported the ceremony’s successful completion, the national anthem, Indonesia Raya, is sung in heartfelt unison by the crowd. This entire ceremony is synchronized across the nation: you can see on national television the same ceremony (though done with considerably more panache) led by the president in Jakarta and imagine it being performed in exactly the same way, and at exactly the same moment, throughout Indonesia.

The main event of the day in Kabanjahé is the parade. By the time the flag ceremony is over the town is already filling with spectators. They stand or sit on the street curbs along the parade route. Young men clamber up on overhanging gateways or sturdy signs to get a better view. By midday it seems that the entire population of the highlands must be assembled around the market square and down the long main street to the reviewing stand set up in front of the bupati’s residence. City parades feature floats, but here there are just uniformed civil servants and groups of marching children from each of Kabanjahé Subdistrict’s forty-six elementary and middle schools. Drum bands and majorettes are costumed in extravagant, gaudy fancies, and some of the children are dressed in ethnic costumes—not just Karo, but Javanese, Balinese, Toba, Simalungun, Malay, Acehnese. Others appear as typical perjuangan figures: boy-guerrillas camouflaged in passion fruit vines and waving bamboo spears with red-painted tips; ragged evacuees carrying huge baskets on their heads; occasionally a girl dressed as a nurse in white, with a neat cap and black bag. The rest of the children march in formation, wearing their everyday school uniforms.

It’s a long way from the soccer field to the center of town, and the marchers have to circle the whole town before the parade ends at the reviewing stand. The smaller kids are usually exhausted by the time they arrive. As each group passes the stand, the drum band performs one song and a quick marching drill, and the head drum majorettes execute a stylish back-dipping curtsey to the inspector of the ceremony (a role taken in turns by various high civilian and military officials), who snaps back a crisp military salute in response.

One Indonesian friend, who was living in Jakarta, sniffed when I said I was interested in these small-town celebrations. They’re just behind the times out there, she said, poor imitations of Jakarta. Another friend, whom I had invited to one of these all-day affairs, grumbled that this was just another instance of the militarization of everyday life. What do you mean? I asked.

Empty ritual.

But it’s not empty ritual or cheap imitation for the enthusiastic crowds who line the streets, listening to group after group play the patriotic Karo song Erkata Bedil (Rifle Reports) on melodeons and snare drums. One woman I saw grabbed her restless son by the shirt collar and, pointing to a group of children dressed as evacuees, told him sharply, Pay attention! This is what we went through for independence!

·  ·  ·

The Indonesian struggle for national independence was the first successful war of liberation in post–World War II Asia. It became a model and inspiration for anticolonial and national struggles worldwide. As a result of its historical precedence and predominantly bourgeois- nationalist (rather than Marxist-internationalist) orientation, as well as its success in welding a nation from diverse and dispersed populations—some thirteen thousand islands, with several hundred linguistically and culturally differentiated groups—in a relatively short time and in the absence of some precolonial entity on which to base its territorial claims, Indonesia became a model and inspiration for theories of nationalism and state formation as well, from Clifford Geertz’s work on new states in the 1960s (Geertz 1973a,b,c) to Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities in the 1980s (Anderson 1991). Since that time there has been a proliferation of local histories, memoirs, and biographies written by and about veterans and political leaders of the struggle. Nevertheless, academic studies of Indonesia’s War for Independence have continued to attend mostly to a small segment of the total national spectrum, focusing geographically on Java, politically on urban elites, and experientially on men.⁴ Without denying the centrality, both before and after the fact, of Java-based elite men in the project of postcolonial state formation, this book shifts attention to one of the neglected parts of that spectrum: rural women and men in the Karo highlands of northern Sumatra. Karo villagers took up the cause of Indonesian independence with an enthusiasm perhaps unexpected in formerly stateless hill people who had been, in James Scott’s (2009) phrase, adept at the art of not being governed. That their enthusiasm found expression in ways often at odds with the state-building projects of the political center is rather less surprising.

The imagining of a national community, as Webb Keane has pointed out, entail[s] a process of imagining its components as well. Thus, to the extent that a ‘center’ defines itself and its authority by defining the ‘margins,’ we should be attentive to the assumptions that underlie our own concepts of ‘the local,’ and their possible complicity with the ‘center’s’ claims to legitimacy (1997:37). Likewise, we should also remain alert to push-backs from the margins—attempts, successful or not, to reimagine or even to relocate the nation’s center.

MAP 1. North Sumatra, with inset of Indonesia.

For more than a century, Karoland and its people have been included in colonial and postcolonial state-building projects mostly as an afterthought. Forcibly incorporated into the Dutch East Indies empire in the early years of the twentieth century, the Karo highlands remained a disregarded backwater through forty years of colonial rule, significant mostly because of its proximity to the profitable plantation zone of Sumatra’s East Coast Residency, for which it served as a convenient leisure destination. During the independence struggle, the republic’s Java-based political leaders rarely noticed events in Karoland, except when they failed to meet the expectations of the central government or the military chain of command. Since independence, even though Karo claim to have the highest percentage of college graduates of any ethnic group in Indonesia, they have been routinely stereotyped as either rural bumpkins or urban thugs. Yet Karo histories, both before and during the independence struggle, are filled with the kind of hidden pretenders to thrones, back-country claims to occult powers, and sheer provincialism that Keane (1997:37) sees as proof that people have a fair capacity for strong alternative views, perhaps even self-deception, about their own importance and agency in the world. It is this sense of ambivalent national belonging, in which Karo are simultaneously incorporated and marginalized, marked as transgressively local by their very enthusiasm for the cause of independence, that I highlight by referring to the outskirts of the national community.

For most Indonesians, the armed struggle against the Dutch took place at some distance (Siegel 1997a:192). Rural populations were relatively sheltered from the fighting, and local participation was sporadic and preferential. Thus, writing of East Java, William Frederick notes that nationalist youths identified themselves with a supra-village world and were in turn seen by the village communities they entered as outsiders (Frederick 1997:221).⁵ In some parts of the archipelago, word of the struggle for independence came only in the garbled form of rumors of Astrimis (from D., extremist; Tsing 1993:79); in other areas news of war did not arrive until well after the fighting was over (W. Keane, pers. comm.). But in the Karo highlands and throughout the former Dutch residency of Sumatra’s East Coast, much of the fighting took place in the countryside rather than in cities and towns. Karo villagers were in the thick of the action from the first clash with Allied peacekeeping troops in December 1945, through two Dutch military campaigns and a near-total evacuation of the district’s population, to the mass demonstrations in 1950 that finally brought the province into the republican fold. Everyone was in motion, recalled Kumpul beru Muham, a schoolteacher and ardent nationalist, and everyone wanted to step forward. There wasn’t anyone who regretted independence. I think everyone supported it. But the beginning of independence was also marked by outbreaks of extreme social violence. In a climate of fear and uncertainty, in which the spirit of liberation was strong but a sense of common purpose was mostly lacking, Karo followed a variety of paths, to futures variously imagined as independence.

Rifle Reports is an ethnographic history of that extraordinary time, as it was recalled by some of the people who have lived to tell of it. It can be read as an anthropological study of the gendering of wartime experience, of the mutual enfolding of home and nation in one corner of Indonesia’s imagined community, and of the actions and aspirations of Karo women and men in the struggle for freedom from Dutch colonial rule. It is, in short, one of the many stories of Indonesian independence that could be told from the outskirts of the nation. How, I ask, might stories such as these complicate or even unravel conventional understandings of what nations are and how they come into being?

But this is also an inquiry into the work of storytelling both as memory practice and as ethnographic genre: how stories of personal experience are told and received; how past events are recalled and reworked in storied form; how narrative plausibility is constructed or dismantled; how the art of narration constitutes its subject(s)—in short, how stories inhabit social space and sociality abides in stories. Such an inquiry demands close attention not only to the content and context of Karo narratives but also to their contours. Matters of form and style, poetics and politics, genre and audiencing practice, memory and forgetting, are as crucial to my analysis as are questions of historical accuracy and authentication. Throughout, I tack back and forth between the poetic and the evidentiary, attentive to a number of shifting temporalities: the events of the struggle, the time of the story’s telling, the representation of time in the story, the rolling present of recollection and of writing, as well as the variously conjoined points in between.

Memory, as Maurice Halbwachs (1992) says, is an effect of community. It is constructed in dialogue, activated by interrogation, and framed by the conventions of narrative plausibility. Personal memory may be constricted by official limits on public discourse, by the formal shape of public commemoration and rituals of remembrance, by the lack of an interested or knowledgeable audience. In the face of what seemed a national campaign to forget all of the experience of the independence struggle except for a few plausibly heroic (and notably Javanese) events—the battle of Surabaya, the burning of the city of Bandung, the general assault on Dutch-held Yogyakarta—and a few officially recognized national heroes (mostly male and, again, mostly Javanese), male veterans frequently gathered for a nostalgic exchange of war stories; indeed, their word for these get-togethers was, literally, nostalgia. In these nostalgia sessions, as Luisa Passerini (1987:19) notes of Italian workers’ accounts of life under fascism, personal memory combines with the collective memory, and individual mythology turns into a tradition that is shared by the storytelling group as a whole. Karo women, with the partial exception of those few who were active in associations of veterans and veterans’ wives, spoke of their experience to a different, mostly unwilling, audience: their children and grandchildren, whose knowledge of the independence struggle mostly derived from school textbooks, TV movies, and comic books. Yet they, too, persevered in their storytelling. With the fiftieth anniversary of independence approaching and most remaining eyewitnesses to the war in their sixties or older, I thought it was important to document those remembered experiences—especially the stories of women, whose part in the struggle remained almost entirely unrecognized.

Between 1993 and 1995 I interviewed more than a hundred people, three-quarters of them women, about their experiences during the independence struggle. They included former soldiers, militia officers, and government officials, as well as teachers, church elders, choir directors, midwives, nurses, entertainers, businesswomen, spirit mediums, and housewives, but the majority were small-scale farmers and traders. Some were people I had known for more than a decade; with others I had only the most transient of contacts. All but a few were ethnically self-identified as Karo. Many were living in or around Medan, the sprawling capital of North Sumatra Province, with their children or grandchildren; some had moved to Jakarta; but most remained in the towns and villages of the Karo highlands. Most were from the so-called Generation of 1945, who came of age during the independence struggle, and so their accounts were no doubt colored by memories of youth, just as their experiences of the period were tinted by the enthusiasms and hopes of that adventurous life-phase. I collected local histories, self-published memoirs, photos from family albums, mimeographed testimonies and historical accounts, old recordings of songs, patriotic comic books, and much more. I read faded typescripts and listened to family stories, hoary jokes, and second- and thirdhand yarns swapped in casual conversations in coffee shops and on bus trips. I haunted record shops and used-book stalls, attended Independence Day celebrations in the Karo highlands, explored archives in the Netherlands and in Jakarta, and was fortunate to receive from friends and colleagues copies of documents I never would have discovered on my own. Not all of these materials are cited here, but all, in one way or another, contributed to the shaping of this book.

IT ALWAYS RAINS ON INDEPENDENCE DAY

In 1993, the first year I attended the Kabanjahé festivities, it rained all day. The marchers were wet and cold, but though some of the younger children looked miserable the parade went on as planned. Standing on the convenient raised portico of a women’s health clinic, which offered a good view of the route if no protection from the rain, I met two elderly women wearing jaunty yellow velvet caps, sarongs, and military-style jackets. I never learned their names, but it was our brief encounter that brought this project into focus for me. Huddled under an umbrella, they posed for my camera and explained that they were veterans of the independence struggle. They showed me their medals. What did you do? I asked.

Whatever they told us to do. Mainly we buried the dead. Later I learned that their home village was not far from Raja Merahé, the site of the final and most disastrous battle in the Karo highlands. On July 31, 1949, a Dutch convoy was attacked by two Karo battalions and an Acehnese assault brigade. There were forty-five casualties on the Indonesian side, including most of the Acehnese, who, armed only with swords, had attempted to take on Dutch tanks. Witnesses said that many of the wounded soldiers, who were unable to escape, were run over by the tanks. Two weeks later the final cessation of hostilities went into effect; at the time of the battle a diplomatic agreement had already been reached between the Dutch and Indonesian governments.

It always rains here on Independence Day, my neighbor on the parade route explained the following year, as the rain dripped from our umbrellas. Karo take this as a kind of soggy tribute, whereby the suffering of the struggle is commemorated in the form of precipitation—though they also recognize that it is, after all, the beginning of the rainy season.

On August 17, 1995, the golden anniversary of Indonesian independence, there was no rain. There had been an extraordinary deluge the night before, however, and the chilly highland air made that evening’s official reception and torchlight parade into acts of endurance for spectators and participants alike. The rain began as the procession was preparing to depart. Representatives of various local social and religious organizations, young soldiers, and high school students stood patiently at parade rest in the downpour with their flickering torches. The recently appointed bupati, Col. D. D. Sinulingga, was smartly uniformed in military dress whites, and, as he started out to salute the marchers, his adjutant dashed up with an umbrella. Colonel Sinulingga shooed him away and, umbrellaless, stood at salute in the rain as the entire procession passed by.⁶ After circling the town, the torchlight parade ended just down the road from the bupati’s residence, in a moment of silent prayer at the Taman Makam Pahlawan, the National Heroes’ Memorial Park.

FIGURE 2. The National Heroes' Memorial Park, Kabanjahé. Funeral of Selamat Ginting, 1994. Photo by the author.

SPEAKING FOR THE DEAD

A town can only be called a town if it has a heroes’ cemetery, Indonesian historian Taufik Abdullah comments. There may be hundreds of heroes’ cemeteries . . . scattered around the country (Abdullah 2009:2), but Kabanjahé’s is the only district-level military cemetery in Indonesia with the official status of Taman Makam Pahlawan, heroes’ memorial park, having been formally dedicated as such before a government directive restricted this designation to national cemeteries at the provincial level or above.⁷ It might seem like a terminological quibble, but the fact that the Karo district has a heroes’ memorial park rather than a garden of happiness (taman bahagia) is a matter of considerable local pride.

FIGURE 3. Nurses Muli beru Sebayang (standing, right) and Tiolina boru Pasaribu (standing, left) with friends, near the village of Pernantin, May 1, 1949. Photo from personal collection of Bapa Ruth Ginting (far left).

Looking through the gateway, you see a flat, grassy expanse broken only by long lines of white markers. Some of these are crosses, others are dome-shaped Muslim nisan, but most are simple white stones, for at the time of the independence struggle few Karo had accepted either Christianity or Islam. As of 1996, there were 735 people buried there.⁸ Many of them had died in military service during the struggle; all were recipients of the Guerrilla Star or had been awarded Class A veterans’ status.

Only one of them was a woman. Her name was Muli beru Sebayang; she is standing in the right foreground of figure 3. She was in the medical corps of a Karo militia brigade and died during the last days of the war, but not in battle. One of her fellow nurses told me that she had come down with dysentery and died before she could be taken to a field hospital. A male companion of hers recounted a different story: she began menstruating heavily and bled to death.

I don’t know which of these accounts (if either) comes close to the truth. The dysentery story may be a polite euphemism, because Karo don’t like to speak of reproductive processes or sexual functions. But it is also possible that the menstruation story is a transcoded fantasy of what can go wrong with women’s bodies in times of war. There may have been another story altogether that her colleagues, friends, and family did not know or perhaps did not wish to share. The photograph, which seems a compelling form of historical evidence, is, like the gravestones, the material trace of an absent voice. It reminds you of how much you don’t know.

Speaking for the dead is, in any case, the task of monuments and poets. In 1963, the Karo composer Djaga Depari gave voice to the dead freedom fighters in a song titled Sora Mido-ido (Voice of Appeal). Depari composed his music on the violin, which he thought could capture most effectively the melancholy vocal quaver characteristic of Karo singing. Although he was sometimes criticized for his Indianized melodies, Depari more or less single-handedly set the standard for Karo popular music in the 1950s and 1960s. Sora Mido-ido is one of his best, and best-loved, songs, and it has become a Karo classic. It begins:

Terbegi sora bulung-bulung erdeso

ibabo makam pahlawan si lino

Hear the soughing of leaves / o’er the deserted Heroes’ Memorial Park, and, in its repeated long o’s, sound as well as sense evokes the chill loneliness of the burial ground:

Bagina sora serko medodo

cawir-ceré sorana mido-ido.

A grievous wail

Clear and bright, the voice of appeal.

Depari was himself a veteran of the independence struggle and an employee of the district Office of Information, but his words invoke the authority of neither his own experience nor his government position. Instead, they draw their moral force from local memory, natural history, and the consecrated ground of national commemoration. Just as the hardships of the struggle are said to be mourned in the August 17 rains, the freedom fighters’ lament is given voice in the grievous wail of leaves in the wind.

Dark billows shading our charred villages,

orphans’ and widows’ tears dropping down,

a shriek that cuts to the soul—these

were the consequences of chasing after freedom.

Listen! you who guide the sails,

avoid greed and triviality,

our breath and blood were the price of this freedom,

don’t squander our nation’s sacred gift.

The waters were red with the blood of our warriors,

the marshes yellow with our tears,

the skies dark with the smoke of burned villages,

we were chasing after freedom.

Give your hand to our lame companion,

sing a lullaby to the orphan child,

let there be peace and compassion for those of one stable,

this is the freedom fighters’ lament.⁹

The song hinges on the moral obligation to repay a debt. Its title, Sora Mido-ido, makes this point elegantly. The root word ido means a credit or claim held against another, the return owed for a loan or labor. Mido, its adjectival form, carries the additional meaning of angrily reproving. Depari’s reduplicative usage mido-ido not only suggests a repeated and emphatic appeal but also underlines the ido within the reproach—the claim registered against an unredeemed debt.

The moral nature of this debt is further stressed by the phrase kahul bangsanta, an ambiguous phrase I have translated as our nation’s sacred gift. The Karo word kahul derives from the Arabic/Malay kaul, meaning vow, but pertains especially to a religious observance pledged in return for the fulfillment of a wish or prayer. In Karo, however, it refers specifically to a living animal offered to the tutelary spirits of the land or forest on behalf of a community or individual. The animal so pledged—usually a white chicken or goat—must be without defect or deformity; it is not killed but released into the spirits’ care. This pure, living gift is not intended as a scapegoat or sacrifice but rather (like Jesus, according to one Karo hymn) as the token and conduit of a continuing spiritual guardianship. Speaking from the nation’s consecrated ground of remembrance, and in the name of the state’s own acknowledged heroes, the poet addresses his words to the country’s leaders: you who guide the sails, / avoid greed and triviality, / . . . don’t squander our nation’s sacred gift.

Local pride and popular memory converge more on the song’s patriotic images than on its dark interrogation of freedom’s human cost. Burned villages, heroic warriors, and grieving women are the subject matter of billboards and painted gateways, war monuments, and patriotic dramas throughout the Karo area. In this struggle, villages were burned, warriors were heroic, and women did grieve. It requires no great insight to say that the burnings, heroism, and grief were not always as simple and straightforward as these patriotic icons like to suggest or that there is more to the story of independence than this. Nevertheless, we may do well to remember that these images are based in Karo experience of the independence struggle and that Karo today understand them as key signifiers of their own collective part in the nation’s birth. These scenes of repetition and remembrance—lieux de mémoire, Pierre Nora (1989) calls them, sites of memory—inscribe the nation’s history in the lives of its citizens, and their memories give it life.

THE NATION AND THE PEOPLE

Equally ambiguous in the phrase kahul bangsanta is its second term, which, following its most common current usage, I have translated as our nation. J. H. Neumann’s Karo-Dutch dictionary (1951) identifies bangsa as a Malay word, meaning "people (D., volk), descent group, family or kind." It can refer to a species or a shared quality (bangsa kucing, the cat species or someone who has catlike qualities), a ruling lineage (bangsa taneh, the people of the land or village founders), or the inhabitants of a territory (bangsa Indonesia, the Indonesian people). The -nta ending is the possessive form of the first person plural inclusive our. It is not entirely clear how expansively inclusive the our is in this case, whether it refers to the audience for the Karo-language song (our people) or the broader imagined community of our [Indonesian] nation.

Nationalist state ideologies are inclined to identify the state with the nation and the nation with the people (Chatterjee 1993:155)—and, I might add, the people with the population. Such identifications not only obscure the complex and ambiguous currents at work within the national community but also serve to legitimize the state’s exercise of force on its own citizens. This is certainly the case in Indonesia, where military command under both the Sukarno and Suharto regimes was justified by the moral myth of struggle, and state violence was largely directed against groups perceived as insufficiently committed to the nation’s birth.¹⁰ One way to begin to undo this association, says Chatterjee, is by making visible the many risky moments in this narrative of anticolonial nationalism, the alternative sequences that were suppressed, the marks of resistance that were sought to be erased (Chatterjee 1993:156). This is not so much a matter of seeking counterhegemonic resistances and oppositions to state power or even to state rhetoric. Nor is it a matter of uncovering the true history behind the mask of ideology or of recovering the silenced subaltern voice. As Chatterjee warns, we should not underestimate nationalism’s capacity to appropriate, with varying degrees of risk and varying degrees of success, stories of marginality and dissent. That is why I began by introducing the reader descriptively to the Karo area through an account of Independence Day celebrations. By taking such public sites of memory as a parade, a popular song, and a national cemetery as narrative points of departure, I aim to deflect readerly expectations of access to a historical memory unmediated by ideology or to unambiguous autobiographical voices, and at the same time acknowledge Karo pride in their part in the nation’s founding.

While criticizing the tendency of nationalisms to depend on an illusory inevitability, we too often allow a similar inevitability to invade our analyses of nationalism. We forget how unlikely such projects may have appeared at their inception, what options might have been available (or not), and what the stakes for inclusion may have been for those on the outskirts of the nation. Throughout this book I highlight the contingency of the nation form, the nature of the state, and the difficulty of aligning local and national worlds of belonging. I