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Lin Hongxuan, "Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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A
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B
New Books in Southeast Asian Studies is sponsored by the ANU Southeast Asia Institute, the Griffith Asia Institute, the New York Southeast Asia Network, the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre.
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C
Hi, welcome to the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies series. I'm your host, Colm Graham from the Asia Research Institute in the National University of Singapore. In this episode, we are talking to Lin Hongshuan, who is assistant professor in the National University of Singapore's Department of Southeast Asian Studies, about his work Umma yet Proletariat, Islam, Marxism and the Making of the Indonesian Republic, published in 2023 by Oxford University Press. Umma yet Proletariat, which focuses on the period from 1915 to 1965, has received widespread praise for vividly bringing forth a world seemingly lost in Indonesia's contemporary ideological landscape, for foregrounding actors own reconciliations of seemingly contrasting beliefs while richly contextualizing them in Indonesian and broader international history, and for being one of the most important studies of Islam and Marx thought about the Muslim majority world published in the last few years. Xuan, welcome to the Southeast Asian Studies series.
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B
Thanks, Colin. Thank you very much for having me.
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C
Great. My pleasure. Let's get straight to discussing your work. First, can you give listeners an overview of your book's central arguments?
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B
So I argue in this book that in the face of the long standing insistence since maybe around the 1950s, at the height of the hot Cold war in Asia, the insistence that Marxism is an existential threat to Indonesian Islam, I show through an in depth analysis of Indonesian print culture, whether it's newspapers, novels, plays or transcripts of speeches, for example, that Islam and Marxism coexisted fruitfully for at least 50 years between 1915, which is the publication of the first unambiguously Marxist newspaper, the free word, until 1965, when a series of very brutal massacres brings open communist participation and politics to an end. So for 50 years, Islam and Marxism coexist fruitfully in Indonesia, contrary to the, you know, the sort of current claims about them being fundamentally incompatible and Marxist ideas being a fundamental existential threat to Islam. I would argue that there are two processes at day, right, that shaped Indonesian politics for most of the 20th century. And made possible these are the conditions of possibility or the confluence of Islam and Marxism. So the first process that's at play is Indonesians translating the world to Indonesia. So they are taking what they see as this common store of intellectual products and historical experiences of other societies, especially Europe, the USA and the Middle east, and they are trying to translate those into the structure of the Indonesian Republic and trying to think about how can we take this common human experiences from elsewhere and inform our decision making about how we want our republic to be. And that's a very deliberate process, right? It's a very, in some ways, Islamocentric Eurocentric process. They are people who have an education, often an Islamic education or a rather elite European education at places like Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Leiden. And they are looking to take what they learned about these other societies and inform how the Republic in Indonesia should look like. So that's the first process. The second big process, I argue, is that many Indonesians are attempting to translate Islam into a political idiom, using Islamic sources of knowledge to construct a kind of intellectual scaffold for viable political alternatives to European imperium, to capitalist democracy or to purported socialist utopia. And this is not a specifically Indonesian phenomenon. It's happening everywhere across the Muslim world. This is part of a broader wave of Islamic modernism is what we call it, or reformism. Sometimes in Central Asia we call it jadidiya. That's sweeping the Muslim world since the late 19th century. And it has both progressive and conservative cultivars. In the case of Indonesia, it tends to lean more progressive during this period. So these are the two big processes at play that I identify as shaping all this intellectual back and forth and ferment occurring across 50 years, whether it is acceptable or whether it is halal, if you like to mix Islamic and Marxist ideas. That's not a question I address. I merely demonstrate that it did happen in Indonesia over and over again and at the highest levels of the Republic's political leadership. So that's the novelty and that's the thrust of this book.
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C
So another of the central contributions you make, I think, is to write the contributions of women as co producers of the anti colonial movement, the nationalist revolution and republican politics, rather than sequester them in a category of women's history. So can I ask first, what were some of the challenges you found in writing women into this history as its co producers?
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B
First, I should preface this response by saying that I made a deliberate decision to incorporate women's voices throughout the text as much as possible instead of sequestering them into a separate chapter. And I deliberately did not choose to position this book as some kind of feminist history or advancing the interests of writing feminist history. And that's because maybe that's a sort of personal idiosyncrasy, but I see this as something that is absolutely fundamental and foundational. All our canonical history writing should of course, should of course include women's perspectives, and that should be something we take for granted, and it should be woven into the fabric of how we write history, in my opinion. So I've scattered them throughout the book as much as I can, wherever appropriate. And what I've really tried to do here is to highlight women's voices in a way that histories written based on archival sources find difficult to do. And the reason is because too much of the archival material is responding to the needs of the colonial state, and often that colonial state and those intelligence services don't take women all that seriously. They are not seen as fundamentally threatening. And of course, even in independent Indonesia, it's better the archival sources, but you still don't see that much of it. They're not so well positioned or well represented in politics. So what I found instead is by relying on Indonesian print culture and using these non archival sources, it's allowed me more scope to display their ideas. Because many women do participate in the Republic of Letters, if you like. And they may not necessarily have whole high office, some do, but most don't. Right. But they have a lot of good ideas and they definitely contribute towards political discourse. It's just not in a way that shows up in an archive so well. So we should point out that only some women had the Education and the status to have their ideas put into writing. One that stands out for me is the first Labour Minister of the Republic, S.K. trimoti. And she had begun life as a journalist and labor activist who was very deeply attracted to Marxist ideals. And it's very clear that she saw herself as a Marxist. We know from her correspondence with various people that she does think of herself as such, but she never ever joined the Communist Party and in fact seemed to quite dislike it. And she continued to advocate for Labour interests throughout her working life. She was able to influence politics briefly as a minister and she was responsible for overseeing Indonesia's first Labour Law as an independent republic. She also contributed to civil society via her role in the prominent women's rights organization garwis, which eventually became Garwani and which was affiliated with the Communist Party of Indonesia, though not subordinate to it, and also in general public opinion as a journalist with all her newspaper articles that she wrote both before and after independence. So she was quite exceptional in terms of her scope for movement as a political activist, her Marxist inspirations and her personal faith as a Muslim, which is also very clear in her correspondence articulated over and over again in her journalistic work. So I think this is one of the people who really stand out for me.
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C
Right.
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B
And I don't know if it's. I would say that. Okay, let me put it this way. She is a relatively clear cut example of a prominent woman whose political speech we can trace.
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C
Right.
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B
But you have to contrast her against many other women whose records are spotty, are ephemeral, their presence is fleeting. So I would like to contrast Trimurti, who has excellent, you know, source base, Right. With a women's rights activist from a Muslim setting, from Muslim political setting called S. Yati. And S. Yati was the. Was a member of the Parthai Sarikat Islam Indonesia women's wing. Right. So this was the. One of the major, not the biggest, but one of the older and quite prestigious Islamic political parties of the Republic. It had begun life as the famous Sarikat Islam of Ajay Omar Saiya Chukonomi Noto. And so Siati was the activist from the PSII's Women's Wing. And in a 1940 anniversary booklet for the Women's Wing celebrating its 10th anniversary, she wrote this extended essay arguing that the Islamic political parties needed to close the gender pay gap amongst plantation workers. She called out the routine abuses of female sharecroppers. They criticized the artificially depressed wages that were endemic in the colonial plantation capitalist system. Explicitly. But all from a very distinctly Islamic ontological position. So it's right or it's wrong based on Islamic ethics.
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C
Right.
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B
And unlike SK Trimurti, she did not identify with Marxism at all, but she left no other writing that I could find beyond this anniversary booklet. But it's also clear that socialist ideals and methods of mobilization, and she advocates things like organizing women only cooperatives and also female peasant unions, which is quite an unusual. It's quite an unusual proposal. A female peasant union, a female labor union. So it seems that these socialist ideals and methods have certainly influenced the political activism. So I think what we see here is on the one hand, we have very prominent women who leave significant cache of sources that we can work with, but who are, by the way, are also very poorly represented in scholarship. No English speaking scholar has written, you know, even a solid journal article about Trimurti, let alone a book. There are biographies, but they tend to be Indonesian and they're not terribly critical. And in the case of Esyati, she's just not in the record at all. She's erased.
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A
Right.
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B
So it's challenging to weave women's voices in, but when you're not trying to sequester them into a chapter or you're not trying to do biographies of great women, it becomes possible, I feel, to deal with that ephemerality, to deal with that spotty appearance and historical record, to be able to say, look, this idea that SDRT is putting forward is one of a broader suite of ideas that are circulating amongst different organizations, different individuals during this period. I don't have to fully flesh her out to make her contribution acceptable or merit inclusion in the book. So I can sort of slot them in. Even if it's imperfect, at least I let the ideas breathe again, have a second airing, if you like.
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C
These histories are around or occurring around 80 to 100 years ago. I think it's important to remind listeners. So your book traces changes in the coalescence of Islam and leftism across five periods for approximately a little over a decade after 1915, during which there was free association between Islam and Marxism, and then a period of suppression into the Japanese occupation, a flourishing of solidarity during the national revolution, then fissures that emerge during a period of parliamentary democracy of the 1950s, and finally decline during the 1960s until the beginning of Suharto's authoritarian era. So what for you were the causes of this trajectory of change?
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B
The transition is different each time from the first phase, which is a sort of like freewheeling, wild phase, right? If you like. There is Space for all kinds of flavors of political activism because of the sort of Dutch ethical impulse. This is basically the Dutch version of the Michion Silverdes at ris. They have to let the natives organize and learn the rudiments of politics, so on and so forth. And so there's a sort of certain space for that which then becomes circumscribed by a series of failed rebellions, but led by the Communist Party, but really pushed by the base rather than by the leadership in 1926, 1927. Now, the change from that first phase to the second phase is really marked by this doomed rebellion, these series of rebellions that break out because of popular pressure, because you're a communist organizer and you tell people, hey, we have to change this structure of oppression. People start getting excited. They start having expectations that are not easily fulfilled. Because to, as the Bolsheviks knew very well, to successfully stage a revolution is no simple feat. A lot of factors have to coalesce. Timing has to be right, and this was not the case. But the demand from below for change, after listening to all this messaging about how unjust and how repressed the Indies were, made it difficult for them to tolerate living, continued living, doing nothing about it. So that doomed, abortive, if you like, rebellion led to a much more restrictive atmosphere in the 1930s. So that's the first, I think, causal factor that causes the first big transition. So in the 1930s, until the Japanese occupation, we have a much more surveillance state. There's a lot more circumscription. Now, of course, the Dutch are not completely without their liberal values. They do try to make space here and there. But it's very clear under a series of conservative governor generals that colonial policy is now meant to obstruct. It's meant to obfuscate. It's meant to, in some cases, just deport people to concentration camps. And Takashi Shiraishi and also Rudolf Marozek have excellent books about the Dutch concentration camps called Boven de Gaulle most famously. It wasn't the only one, but it's the most famous one. So that's the second phase. Now, the second to the sort of transition from the second phase to the third phase is basically the Japanese occupation. The Japanese invade, everything falls apart. I don't cover the Japanese occupation in this book because really, sources are too difficult during that period. There isn't a whole lot of stuff, and people are really not at liberty to publish as they would like. Right. Space for movement is extremely circumscribed. So I move straight to the revolution. So I would say that for me, in the context of this book, the third phase is the revolution. So what's the big causal factor that causes that transition from the second to the third phase? Well, it's the interregnum, it's the Japanese occupation. But more importantly, it is also the inability of the Allies to reconquer Indonesia. It is also the rather poorly thought out way in which the British facilitated allied reconquest in both Vietnam and Indonesia, basically playing handmaiden to French and Dutch empires, who, I mean, really was not a great calculation given how weak both of these former powers had become. And it was not wise for the British to stake their reputation and their resources in the hope of rebuilding their sort of military alliances in Europe by facilitating colonial reconquest. So the ways in which that process played out, that British involvement in both Vietnam and Indonesia really facilitated and really jump started Indonesian nationalism. It wasn't just that the prestige of white dominion had faded because of the occupation. It's also that the British did a really terrible job of trying to restore empire on behalf of the French and on behalf of the Dutch. And it stimulated massive resistance, massive, truly massive resistance in Indonesia. And this is something that David Van Raybrook points out rather well in his book Revolucity. It's something that Tim Harper and Chris Bailey have covered very well in forgotten wars, forgotten armies and forgotten wars. And this is one of the big changes that really launches us into this brave new world of wow, Empire is well and truly dead and we have to imagine what comes after it. And that's the revolutionary of fluorescence. Political space is created for a whole variety of Indonesian political thinkers to consider. Okay, what now? What do we want to replace Dutch Imperium, which looked so stable for so long, which looked so unchallengeable? What do we want so from then, from the revolution, which I believe is a sort of moment of a florescence that is attempting to weld this complex centrifugal political field into a hybrid polity with its own third way, if you like, neither socialist nor capitalist, through prosperity and equity. That's what I think of it as. This revolutionary fluorescence might sound sort of idiosyncratic or eccentric, and I think that's maybe a little unfair, even though I'm also quite harsh on them in this book. I think that that's not that unusual if you think about it. A good many countries attempted this as well, some more successfully than others. But given that we're both in Singapore right now, it's worth Pointing out that the People's Action Party did exactly attempt to steer a third way between socialism and capitalism. And of course, that balance has shifted over time, but there are still very strong socialist vestiges. And indeed, one of the early presidents, Devin Nair, published a book in 1976, I believe, in response to Singapore being kicked out of the Socialist International. Sorry, the pap getting kicked out of the Socialist International. He published a book called Socialism that Works the Singapore Way. So in a sense, this is a very normal postcolonial effort to hybridize, to find a way forward that does not involve alignment with the PRC or the alignment of USSR or alignment of the usa. So I don't think it's that odd. But we don't tend to think or talk about it like this. We don't tend to think about Indonesia that way. The Cold War rhetoric of the period predisposes us to look at this as communist red wave domino theory. We tend to get stuck in that rut when we really don't have to be okay. So moving from that period of revolutionary fluorescence to what I think of as the parliamentary democracy experiment, this is the kind of attempt to make this revolutionary fluorescence work in practice, but doesn't really happen. They try, but it doesn't work. So that period is where reality bites, right? So what makes the transition is now we have. What fuels that transition from revolutionary fluorescence to experiment of parliamentary democracy is of course, the achievement of independence rather successfully, despite overwhelming odds and not through military might, but through a combination of basically tenacious resilience, refusing to lie down and die, refusing to give up, stuffing it out until the Dutch have no steam left and some good diplomatic maneuvering as well on the part of Indonesia. So they get their independence and they get it on their terms, not under the Dutch terms, which would have been a sort of fragmented, federalized United States of Indonesia. That was the negotiated outcome. And within a year, the Indonesians are like, you know what? We're not doing that. This is a unitary state. This is unitary republic. And so that is the catalyst for the experiment of parliamentary democracy. But of course, parliamentary democracy is difficult. It's difficult even for mature democracies, right? Everyone everywhere struggles with it. And there's no surprised that Indonesians struggled with it too. And so that period raised so many expectations after so many years of suffering, right? It raised so many expectations that were not fulfilled. And I think that's unsurprising and quite normal that after so much trauma, people want to see changes and want to see them Fast. And whether we're talking about Bangladesh today, whether we're talking about Sri Lanka today, same problem. People want to see changes and they want to see them fast, but they are not. Such changes are not easily achievable overnight. And so, unsurprisingly, that democratic experiment failed. And that fuels the transition to the fifth and final phase that I cover in the epilogue, which is what I call Sukarno's guided democracy, his NASA kom period. And that's where the efflorescence is now. And attempts to institutionalize that efflorescence is now wilting on the vine. It's still born. Parliamentary democracy is not able of, you know, delivering prosperity. In fact, they can't even deliver a stable government. It delivers a series of coalition governments, minority governments, very often so, like Belgium for example, or Germany at the moment. And it just can't deliver strong policy. It doesn't have the resources, it doesn't have the political stability. There's all these rebellions going on. The CIA is instigating some of them. It's a constant struggle.
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C
Right?
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B
So Sukarno's answer to all that is, well, we gave it a try. Don't say I didn't let you have your turn. Now it's time for all of you to shut up and follow what I think. Now we will take a leaf out of Mao's playbook and we're going to do this charismatic leadership style. One charismatic authoritarian is going to be making decisions and hopefully I will do a better job than our very fragmented parliamentary democracy could. And of course this does not go well. And I think the confluence of Islam and Marxism, it dies in this period because Sukarno takes it and he turns it into a vehicle for achieving his own political ends. And a good chunk of those political ends are sort of self aggrandizing personal ends. So he uses it, but he's not actively attempting to institutionalize it structurally. Implement socialist or Islamic socialist, if you like, policies like Zakat taxation, for example, 2.5% wealth tax, something that many of the Muslim parliamentarians were talking about, thinking about what about 2.5% wealth tax? He's not implementing any of these things. He's too busy rebel rousing and trying to stay captain of the political ship. So that's where it really begins to denigrate and become an empty shell of what it used to be. And perhaps that is inevitable, possibly. But that is what capitalizes that final phase, that final transition is the dysfunctionality of parliamentary democracy.
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C
Based that, some 50 years of history. What do you make of the subsequent emergence of neat categories of nationalist, communist and Islamic that come to dominate political discourse?
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B
This is one of the, I think, important, but also perhaps somewhat contentious parts of my book. People who know Indonesia a lot better than me may dispute it, and I'm open to the criticism. But I think one of the book's important contributions to my mind.
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C
Is.
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B
I'm taking inspiration from scholars of Indonesian Islam like Merle Rickluffs, and I'm trying to undermine this addiction that we scholars have to the conceptual shorthand of aliran, right? Aliran means stream. And when we say aliran, we basically mean nationalist or communist or Islamic. And you see this kind of aliran apologization being deployed in history and many other areas, right? Like in China, we talk about Kuomintang as a nationalist party. What does that really mean, Right. In practice, sure. I mean, some political parties and movements conform much better to typologization, but many of them do not. And this is certainly the case in Indonesia. These are not useful categories beyond specific situations, basically. Right? So so many of the activists that I study in this book and even some of the political coalitions that I look at in this book, they cannot easily be categorized. Being a communist, for example, had a multiplicity of meanings and expressions, which was especially true for some people like the kyai. Haji Ahmad Dasuki Siraj was a PKI member, a Communist Party member, but also an Islamic scholar. Kyai in the traditional. In the tradition of pesantry in Islam, a sort of boarding school, traditional way of learning Islam. You know, what Wycliffe calls the mystic synthesis. And he was passionate Muslim as well as a passionate communist. He's on the record at the Constitutional assembly debates saying, so if I may read from a little section of my book, right? So on page 263, I cover the Constitutional assembly debates over. This is from the parliamentary democracy period in the 50s. They're debating what kind of constitution should the Republic have, what permanent constitution should it have. And so Siraj goes up on stage. This is all on record because this happened during the Constitutional assembly debates. And he proudly stated that he had been a PKI Communist Party member for 33 years, pretty much since the beginning. And he saw his membership as a matter, in his words, political practicality. He was a PKI member because PKI policies best advanced Muslims interests in accordance with. With God's injunctions. This position evinced a high degree of continuity with earlier Islamic communists like Haji Misbah, who believed that communism constituted the best vehicle for achieving Islamic goals. Now, Siraj's emphasis on political practicality also echoed a position adopted by Tan malaka in the 20s, which was that communists were free to choose which religion they embraced and Indonesians were free to wear as many hats as they wished. So quoting Surah an Nisa Ayah 75 in both Arabic and in Indonesian. So he repeats himself just kind of like flex show, like, hey, I'm a real scholar. I speak Arabic. Well, he's a hafiz, at least I don't know how much of a scholar he is. But he's memorized the Quran, so he reads it in both Arabic and Indonesian, and he asks his colleagues, what is the matter with you, my fellow parliamentarians, sorry, delegates who do not fight for Allah's cause, for the oppressed men, women and children, who say, O Lord, remove us from our place of oppression and appoint for us a protector and helper. He's quoting the Surah here. This was the thrust of Siraj's argument. If the Quran enjoins Muslims to fight injustice, they ought to seek the most effective path to do so. If that path involved joining the pki, then so be it. In what must have been an infuriating turn of phrase to his Masumi, the main Islamic political party, to his Masumi colleagues in the Constitutional Assembly, Siraj ended his speech by proclaiming that the PKI was the only party dedicated to practicing God's laws in their political form. And he invited the Masumi delegates, who would like to implement God's laws sincerely to join the pki. So it gives you a sense, right, of how there's this multiplicity of expressions of what it means to be a pious Muslim, but also which can include being a communist in this period. And this is not some weirdo teacher and his passantra and telling his students his own idiosyncratic beliefs. This is a guy debating his Islamic party colleagues in the Constitutional Assembly. Just one example, but there are many like it. This is a prominent example. Yeah. So I think what I'm trying to do here is I really complicate the idea that it is such a thing as an ontological or heuristic device that allows us to say this is communist or this is nationalist or this is Islamist. It doesn't really mean anything in this context. It's not very useful. Now, that said, these categories are still useful insofar as some people do explicitly identify themselves as such even today. Right. And therefore their self categorizations demand our respect, at least in a sort of emic anthropological sense, but as a scholarly heuristic device for understanding political constituencies, I think it's weak, and it's very weak. So it may be cumbersome. But I think this book shows that we're going to have to spend more words talking about context than relying on simplistic losses.
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C
That's certainly a fantastic example that runs against centralized political identities. So I wonder what might have been something you discovered while doing research that significantly altered a preconceived notion you had.
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B
I think what I really enjoyed, and also what surprised me a lot, was that I started this project as a very narrowly Indonesia centric project. I was very focused on Indonesia and as grad students should be to complete their dissertations in a timely manner and not lose funding. But once you start seeing confluences of Islam and Marxism, you start seeing similar phenomena everywhere, actually. And as the dissertation ground along and research ground along, I began to realize, oh wow, this is not that uncommon. There's a good bit of it happening elsewhere. So I began to learn about similar phenomena in South Asia. And here I'm thinking of Lili Uddin's dissertation, but also her article Rit Maulanas in History Compass, I also wrote began to learn about it in Central Asia, most notably Aaron Tassar's Soviet and Muslim so thinking about how Muslims survive and navigate the socialist world of the Soviet Union. And my personal favorite, which has a spot in the introduction, is in the Eastern European context, in what we would call the Bloodlands today, mostly Ukraine, but, you know, parts of Poland for example, as well. And this is Alain Poissat and Sylvie Klingberg's revolutionary Yiddish land, where they talk about this really complex, truly, truly complex and truly diverse Eastern European world of the shtetl, but also of the cities where many Jews were deeply attracted to communism or part of organizations like the Bund, but also attracted to Zionism, also deeply Orthodox in their faith or reformist in their faith. And so they pull in all kinds of different directions. And that really reminded me of Indonesia. You had these people who felt they did not need to explain or they did not need to square the circle between their religious identities and their political commitments. So that was really fun part.
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C
Speaking of fun, do you have an enjoyable or memorable research experience to share? Did you make much use of archives?
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B
The vast majority of this material came from open access, just library stuff, stuff that people are not looking at, put aside. So I did not actually have to go to the rcip. I didn't have to go to the National Archive in Jakarta to get this book done where I did lean on archival material. The extent to which I did so was in relation to the revolution when I started using Dutch intelligence reports to fill some of the gaps. And they were very useful, actually. And they created some spinoff projects as well, including one on Gustav Mefendi, the first Indonesian to sit in a Dutch parliament, and on Samawan and Darsono. So there were archival sources involved, but this was sort of by the by, actually. But I did have some really fun research experiences on my non archival sources. And so the most favorable one is when I started looking into this hyper local and rather obscure organization called the dki Communist Party of Indonesia, Local Islami. So local Communist Party, Islamic. And it was this really insubordinate militia that was running, running amok basically in West Sumatra during the revolution. Right. And the army is just like you people are out of control. Who do you think you are, right? Living like bandits, refusing to obey military orders, basically running like a bandit gang and calling ourselves part of the revolution. And so I started digging and this was, you know, I first learned about them from Audrey Cahin's book on West Sumatra. Excellent book, by the way. Really thick, really dense. And it led me to dig through Ben Anderson's private papers at the Cornell Library. And it also led me to dig through Audrey Cahin's research notes, her field notes from the 70s when she was writing this book. So there's handwritten and typewritten documents that were really fun, really, really fun to look through, including Ben Anderson's profiles of various politicians and rather acerbic wit of his. And I never did find much on this particular organization, just bits and bobs here and there. But it was just enough to sort of merit inclusion in chapter three, a few pages worth talking about this sort of localized forms of syncretic political participation.
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C
Right.
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B
But it was an enjoyable bit of excavation that yielded all these little nuggets of information scattered across Ithaca, Bagang, west Sumatra, Singapore, ICs, Jakarta. And it was all the more enjoyable because Audrey Cahin has lovely dogs. So it was a nice experience.
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C
Another resource your book draws from is historical fiction. Can you talk about how historical fiction informs your analysis and perhaps favorite works that you used?
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B
Ah, okay, so this is, I think I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that two particular books that I really like and that I read in the course of this, in the course of my research. So one is a novel called Salah Asuhan, which is rather poetically translated as Never the Twain, you could say Indivisible is Another way of translating it, anyway. And the other one is Agam Wispy's play from the revolutionary era called. Which means box car in the sense of a train. Right. So to begin with Salah Asuhan, which was written in the 20s, I believe, or maybe even the late 1910s by Abdul Mois, it's considered a rather trapped piece of curate fiction. So it's a little, I don't know, Thomas Hardy, perhaps in an Indonesian context, but I think some of my Indonesian friends would really disdain this book.
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C
Right.
- [36:45]
B
But I actually, as a Singaporean, I was deeply colonized in taste and desire, in language, all kinds of different ways, and cannot shed it even as much as I would like to. I couldn't help but identify with these elite Indonesians of the colonial period who could not resist the educational opportunities offered by the Netherlands, which is what this book is about. A young man who gets to go to university in the Netherlands and the psychological trauma it causes him. Basically, I couldn't help but identify with these elite Indonesians who didn't resist the opportunities for education in the Netherlands, but who were deeply hurt and tainted by their participation in the imperial educational system and what it made them do, what it made them learn and the hoops that made them jump through and the compromising personal situations it put them in. So it kind of reminded me, actually, of the first time I read Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. It hit me how culturally alienated and lost I fundamentally am and how I'm fundamentally shaped by Britain's colonial legacies and unable to escape without sort of painfully contorting myself into a new version of me. So that, I think, hits home, even if it's not great fiction. Perhaps Gebong is different. Gerbong is, I think, really a deep cut. Nobody knows Gerbong anymore. They know Agam Whispy, but nobody knows Gerbong. I even tried to get a local theater troupe to consider staging. It didn't. Didn't work. So Gerbong is this really socialist realist play, but it's excellent dialogue and it's really cuts. So there's something so piercing about its depiction of the unhealable physical and psychic wounds of the revolution of war that civilians have to shoulder. And the playwright, Agam Wispy, he never shies away from all the uncomfortable parts, whether that's amputation or prostitution or destitution. And he made the Indonesian revolution feel very real to me. It's power fiction, the whole hidden white thing, the whole Stephen Greenblatt neuromantics new Historicists, the power of historical fiction to bring something home. Even for somebody who deals with so much of these sources, contemporary sources, it's hard to truly summon the emotional reality of the revolution and its detritus, its debris, its cost.
- [39:09]
C
Right.
- [39:10]
B
In a way that fiction sometimes can. And so it reminded me of how I felt when I read first hand accounts of the Battle of Surabaya, for example.
- [39:19]
C
Right.
- [39:20]
B
But Garbong is the opposite of stirring. It is depressing. And it kind of reminds me a bit of Margaret Steeley's Rifle Reports, her sort of anthropological subaltern take on the revolution as seen from Sumatra. It's cutting and it's moving at turns. So it's a rather special play to me. I would love to see it stage, but I don't think it even has resonance in Indonesia today, let alone in Singapore. It has resonance for me.
- [39:54]
C
Well, on that note, what are your hopes for the future direction of research about the history of theology and political ideology?
- [40:01]
B
So I would love to see more work being done on leftist articulations of faith. I do see some of that. I do already begin to see some of that. I want to see how people look at different modalities of piety that are little more focused on socioeconomic justice in concrete ways. So advocating actual institutional arrangements like progressive taxation, labor rights, universal basic income, concrete stuff like that. And I'm interested in this regardless of which religious tradition we're talking about. So one of my former colleagues here at Yale, Musa Mahadev, she does that in the context of Sri Lanka. But there's obviously a whole bunch of people who work on liberation theology in a Latin American context. But yeah, I'd love to see a leftist press like Verso, for example, talk a little bit more about religion. I mean, they are boutique, right? But I'd love to see an expansion of what Aaron Tassar is doing, Soviet and Muslim, what various authors have already begun over the years, but has never really rooted itself. I would love to see more of that and I hope that this book has been a step in that direction.
- [41:15]
C
And finally, can you tell us, if you like, about any current or future endeavors?
- [41:22]
B
So what I'm doing, I'm sort of riffing off the previous question, I suppose. What I'm currently working on is second book project on the production and adaptation of progressive Islamic ideas across the Indian Ocean. Literal. But of course, given my limitations in terms of languages and sources, I'm focusing particularly on the reception and adaptation of those ideas and production of those ideas in the Malay Archipelago, so Malaya, Singapore, Indonesia over the, shall we say, long 20th century. So I think I want to take seriously the idea of an ecumeny or a sub ecumene of Indian Ocean Islam, or what is sometimes called Monsoon Islam, right, In which ideas, pilgrims, texts, Sufi sheikhs, scholars, for example, circulate and engage with one another, but taking it into a more, shall we say more recent time period and in a more deliberately progressive direction. So this is the kind of thing that Ronit Ritchie has done really well to show this Arabic cosmopolis across the Indian Ocean, literal, now green with his Bombay Islam. They illustrate this world really well, but it's an 18th century world, if not even older. It's this pre modern in many ways world. So I would argue. Well, actually this is kind of still active, I think, at least to some degree, and it's often active in surprising ways. So what I'm doing, what I've been doing so far, I've identified a short list of progressive Muslim thinkers and I've been scraping this library data to see how many of their books have been published in Indonesian, how many commentaries have been written about them by Indonesians, how many theses and dissertations have been written engaging their work. So that's the kind of source space I'm using and looking at. My short list of thinkers includes Ali Shariati, who is Shi' I and therefore slightly surprising that he should be so well read in Indonesia, which is a little allergic to Shiism, but you'll be surprised at the amount of engagement that Ali Shariati has, or even this Ismaili Dawudi Bora Asghar Ali, engineer, sort of Indian Muslim ideologue and thinker, not surprisingly well known in Indonesia. A good many people have written theses on him. So that's the kind of work I'm looking at. So thinking about how progressive ideas have spread, how they've transmuted, perhaps in Indonesia. So it's still very early stage. I have two very young children. I have not been able to make much progress on this, but we'll get there.
- [43:56]
C
Well, I look forward to it. Thanks very much for talking about Umahiyat Proletariat, Islam, Marxism and the Making of the Indonesian Republic, published by Oxford University Press in 2023. On this episode of New Books in Southeast As Studies.
- [44:11]
B
Thank you so much for having me, Colm.
- [44:12]
C
You're most welcome. You have been listening to New books in Southeast Asian Studies. You can download many more interviews about books focused on Southeast Asia or on other themes you may be interested in via the New Books Network website or wherever you download your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
- [44:37]
B
Sam.