Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- A note on spelling, pronunciation and names
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 Our colonial soil
- 2 Cultures of the countryside
- 3 ‘To assail the colonial machine’
- 4 The Revolution
- 5 Living in the atomic age
- 6 From Old to New Orders
- 7 Terror and development in happy land
- 8 Age of globalisation, age of crisis
- Biographies of key figures
- Abbreviations and glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- LIST OF MODERN HISTORIES
3 - ‘To assail the colonial machine’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- A note on spelling, pronunciation and names
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 Our colonial soil
- 2 Cultures of the countryside
- 3 ‘To assail the colonial machine’
- 4 The Revolution
- 5 Living in the atomic age
- 6 From Old to New Orders
- 7 Terror and development in happy land
- 8 Age of globalisation, age of crisis
- Biographies of key figures
- Abbreviations and glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- LIST OF MODERN HISTORIES
Summary
Travelling to cities broadens the mind, or it did in the Netherlands East Indies. One Balinese prince, Anak Agung Made Djelantik, can recall the experience in 1931 of being sent to junior high school in the town of Malang, in East Java, leaving behind his primary school days of Bali's largest town, Denpasar. Djelantik had grown up in East Bali, in a palace that was an extended set of houseyards, around which were clustered some of the dwellings of his father's subjects. His early life was the life of a village where society was rigidly hierarchical, and life revolved around farming. For his preliminary schooling he had to travel five hours from his family palace, to Denpasar, then a town of 15,000 people, just over a hundred of whom were Europeans.
In 1931, after a six-hour drive to Singaraja in North Bali, the young Djelantik caught a KPM steamer en route from Ambon and Makasar, for an exciting journey to Surabaya. From Surabaya he took another car 80 km south to Malang – population 87,000 – where he met not only local Javanese, but people from all over the Indies. He boarded with a Dutch teacher's family, where he learned new kinds of behaviour. He had to learn to wear pyjamas, say ‘wel te resten’ (sleep well) and turn off the lights at night, to eat breakfast of chocolate granules sprinkled on bread spread with Palm Tree brand margarine, to do the opposite of Balinese politeness and comment on a meal, as well as conversing during it, and to like cheese, cauliflower and brussels sprouts.
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- Information
- A History of Modern Indonesia , pp. 59 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005