Photographer. Lives in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

The LibArts Questionnaire

Who is your favourite artist?
The Indonesian painter, Prince Raden Saleh Syarif Bustaman.

What inspires you?
Human behaviour within the context of social, cultural and economic life. And of course my dear mother’s spirit and passion, which are always present in my life.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Perfect happiness is working on culture through the medium of photography and doing solo exhibitions. Life is really beautiful.

What is your greatest fear?
That I die without leaving any ideas behind. I want to leave a legacy for my children and grandchildren that they may love and respect photography, history and culture.

More about the artist

A LibArts Review Essay

The guardians of Javanese tradition

by Christine Olivier

For more than two and a half centuries, faithful servants in the Sultan’s palace have been safeguarding the Javanese culture in Indonesia. Despite the country’s massive modernisation over the past few decades, there are still over a thousand loyal abdi dalem working on a voluntary basis in the kraton (the sultan’s palace) in Yogyakarta, a small province in Java, Indonesia’s most densely populated island. For them, Indonesia’s new-found democracy is threatening the hierarchical foundations of their language, their thoughts and their service as royal servants.

The special province of Yogyakarta [1] in south central Java is the only province in Indonesia still governed by a pre-colonial monarchy, the Sultanate of Yogyakarta. The city of Yogyakarta is the capital of the province, home to the kraton (the physical and spiritual centre of this old court city) and the centre of Javanese culture, refinement and spiritual power. For the abdi dalem, their spiritual protection and proximity to the sultan, as Allah’s representative on earth, cannot be measured by material standards and even time is measured through the reigning sultan and their service in the kraton.

Inside the palace walls a romanticized past exists alongside the modern, commercialised city a few blocks from the palace gates. When the palace closes for tourists each day, the abdi dalem sprinkle water and flowers on the pillars and burn incense to exorcise evil spirits. They live in a world of whispers and resonant silences full of memories of ancient legends, magic and spirits. For the most part, they are rural poor who serve in the kraton to preserve and absorb the power of this spiritual centre. To dedicate oneself to the work of an abdi dalem is not about finding employment. The calling is based on an inner search for spiritual peace and protection by the divine spirit of the kraton. Their profound and complex faith (based on Islamic concepts influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism and Javanese mysticism) strengthens these custodians of an ancient tradition in their task to safeguard the physical and spiritual properties of the palace and pass on this knowledge and responsibility to younger generations to preserve this cultural centre in Java.

The mystical authority historically vested in the kraton is further reinforced by the fact that it played a leading role during the two most important events in Indonesia’s history. In 1945 Sultan Hamengkubuwana IX was instrumental in Indonesia’s revolution and subsequent independence from Dutch rule. In 1998 his son, Sultan Hamengkubuwana X was a key figure in the democratic revolution which led to President’s Suharto’s resignation and their first free elections in over 44 years.[2]

Like most people in central Java, the abdi dalem speak Javanese, a classical language with an unusually elaborate use of social speech levels. They do not speak Indonesian, the official national language which is based on the more “democratic” Malay language. Deeply influenced by the Javanese culture of knowing your own status in the social order, showing proper respect to those in high positions and protecting those in lower positions, to speak Javanese is to speak in hierarchy as well as in language.[3] The Dutch colonists preferred Indonesian which is less hierarchically structured and much easier than Javanese, as the language of colonialism.[4]

Described by scholars as a form of high art whose inherent graciousness create a world of intense beauty, it is a language of intimate communication, modesty and restraint, which explains the abdi dalem’s passive acceptance of their role as quiet guardians of a spiritual place. With its focus on elegance rather than content, stories are a cooperative effort to create a world of serenity, tolerance and harmony. Speakers will compete to praise and to bestow a calm graciousness on their interlocutors rather than express their own personality and feelings, as the pursuit of personal desires would endanger the harmony. In the early 1990’s, Laine Berman (an American scholar who researched the Javanese language in Yogyakarta) served as an abdi dalem in the palace for two years and wrote: “Sitting cross-legged on the outdoor palace stage without moving for hours (and sometimes all night long) in a tight jarik was agonizing for the first year I served in the palace. In time, however, through the guidance and influence of these old women I learned to deal with and even control the pain in still silence. This lesson, it turned out, was of major symbolic importance for my beginning to understand the Javanese language and its related concept of self.” (Berman 1998:27)

Now, more than ever, the abdi dalem are holding on to their self-repressive values of hierarchy as the foundation for harmony. Yogyakarta is surely one of the few places where given the opportunity to vote for a chief executive, the legislature voted not to vote. However, they cherish their new-found democracy and as subject-citizens they now have the right to confirm their Sultan as their governor. (Woodward 2010:8)

For these royal servants, who talk, dream and hope in Javanese, a form of social control in itself, individual freedom is not yet part of their dream.

Footnotes

1. After independence in 1945, Indonesia was officially declared a Republic and the special province of Yogyakarta as a kingdom with all internal power and authority in the hands of the Sultan. [back]
2. In August 1945 the Dutch finally admitted defeat in the kraton’s pavilion where the sultan signed the final papers for Indonesia’s Independence. In 1998 a number of discussions that eventually led to the fall of the Suharto government took place in the same pavilion. [back]
3. When one talks about oneself, one has to be humble. But when one speaks of someone else with a higher status or to whom one wants to be respectful, honorific terms are used. Status is defined by gender, age, social position, qualifications and experience. [back]
4. “Javanese was singularly inappropriate for colonial discourse, particularly in the systems of indirect rule that were a basic element of Dutch colonial strategy. To speak to native elites in ngoko, the appropriate level with which to address inferiors would have been extremely insulting and would have undermined their authority with local populations on which Dutch rule depended. To speak to them in kromo or even more so in kromo ingill, the levels in which elite status in Javanese culture mandates, would have undermined colonial authority. To have spoken Dutch would have been to accept them as equals. This left Malay/Indonesian as the only viable alternative through which to maintain the legitimating fiction and irresolvable contradiction of local authority and colonial power.” (Woodward 2010:16) [back]

Sources:

1. ‘Abdi Dalem-home’. Available at http://library.thinkquest.org/08aug/02593/. [Accessed 19 April 2012]
2. Berman, Laine. 1998. Speaking Through the Silence: Narratives, Social Conventions, and Power in Java. OUP USA.
3. Brenner, Suzanne A. 1991. ‘Competing Hierarchies: Javanese Merchants and the Priyayi Elite in Solo, Central Java’. Indonesia (52) (October 1): 55–83.
4. Byrnes, Sholto. ‘One Nation Undivided Under God’. New Statesman. Available at http://www.newstatesman.com/asia/2010/08/indonesia-muslim-suharto-east. [Accessed 19 April 2012]
5. Byrnes, Sholto. ‘The Dark Side of Paradise’. New Statesman. Available at http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2008/07/democracy-philippines. [Accessed 19 April 2012]
6. ‘Discover Indonesia: Central Java, Kraton’. Available at http://discover-indo.tierranet.com/centjawa4.htm. [Accessed 19 April 2012]
7. Geertz, Clifford. 1996. After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures). New ed. Harvard University Press.
8. Hughes-Freeland, Felicia. 1991. ‘A Throne for the People: Observations on the Jumenengen of Sultan Hamengku Buwono X’. Indonesia (51) (April 1): 129–152.
9. ‘Java Travel Information and Travel Guide – Indonesia – Lonely Planet’. Available at http://www.lonelyplanet.com/indonesia/java. [Accessed 19 April 2012]
10. Kumar, Ann. 1980. ‘Javanese Court Society and Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century: The Record of a Lady Soldier. Part I: The Religious, Social, and Economic Life of the Court’. Indonesia (29) (April 1): 1–46.
11. Philip, Bruno. ‘Overstretched Jakarta’s Future as Indonesia’s Capital Is in Doubt’ World News, Guardian Weekly. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/28/jakarta-indonesia-capital-livable-move. [Accessed 19 April 2012]
12. Sardar, Ziauddin. ‘Tolerance v Terror’. New Statesman. Available at http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2008/07/indonesia-malaysia-islam. [Accessed 19 April 2012]
13. Soejatno, and Benedict Anderson. 1974. ‘Revolution and Social Tensions in Surakarta 1945-1950’. Indonesia (17) (April 1): 99–111.
14. Strassler, Karen. 2010. Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java. Duke University Press.
15. Woodward, Mark. 2010. Java, Indonesia and Islam. 1st ed. Springer.

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