In praise of idyllic Indonesia
Speaking generally
By Chanchal Sarkar

SEVEN or eight years ago, the then Government of Indonesia had commissioned a film on that country of 17,000 islands. An American company had produced the film which was shown on giant screens. It was really wonderful and I kept remembering it during the turbulent and violent days of Indonesia in the last months.

What a beautiful land it is, with forests, seas, thousands of rare species of plants and animals and an amazing sense of beauty among the people. The only connection with us was the Indian Ocean. Sailors from here who had gone there in proud ships whose images are still visible in sculpture. Indonesian religion, culture and governance were much affected by this mingling, even after Islam swept through some of the main islands. But now the links are very few even though three-and-a-half hours is all that it takes by air.

Because of this alienation, we know and care very little about Indonesia and the compliment is fully returned. Sixty or 70 years ago only Rabindranath Tagore had the vision to seek links and made his long visit by ship to Indonesia and came back with examples of Indonesian art. A little later, teachers of Batik came to Santiniketan where the tradition of Batik still survives. Tagore’s dance dramas must have been influenced by Balinese dancing.

Today the picture is very different. Indonesia, including Java and its main city Jakarta, are the focus of popular movements, mainly by the students, which helped to bring down the Suharto regime of 32 years and also the Habibie government. The military in Indonesia is still very powerful. Can the Suharto family and eight of its prominent members be shown to be the exploiters of Indonesia’s resources and economic possibilities? It may take time, already the first judiciary has thrown out the charges of corruption against Suharto but they may be brought back with vehemence by the public.

What is clear is that Indonesia has a very difficult time ahead. East Timor is one example though not the only one. To the North of Sumatra are the Acehs who demand their own state and the people there are caught between the violence of the Indonesian Army and the autonomy movement led by fanatics. Meanwhile, as we have seen on TV, there is violence against the wealthy Chinese minority and the Christians as in India.

What will be denoument of a country which has enormous resources including 515 specimens of mammals, 477 species of palms, and 1,519 species of birds? It is destroying its environment at the rate of a million hectares of forest a year. Indonesia has 356 cultures and 260 languages.

Interestingly, just as there is a movement to try Suharto and his relatives — sons, daughters and sons-in-law for corruption there’s an attempt to re-examine the great slaughter of 1965 when more than half a million people were killed for Communist sympathies and Suharto climbed the throne. The reasons for that slaughter are now being re-examined by human rights people.

Desh

Some years ago I had a violent dispute with a close friend who was a distinguished student and writer of Hindi. I held that Hindi had no journals like the best in Marathi, Tamil or Bengali and she disagreed. As proof I mailed her copies of the Bengali periodical Desh.

In the years since, I had stopped subscribing to Desh and have just resumed. The first issue to come has loads of interesting things to read — short stories, articles and poems and a survey of current Bengali literature. But I am always struck by the quality of the letters, the book reviews and the pages of book-advertisements.

In the current issue there’s a long letter about Nirad Chaudhuri and his suitability or otherwise as a biographer of Max Mueller and two other letters about Kashmir and about language. These letters are from the mofussil and I am amazed at the meticulous scholarship that exists there.

Despised by mainstream

They are a tragic community and despised by the mainstream — the eunuchs of India. And little about them is known except for what was written by Zia Jaffrey some years ago in: The Invisibles: A Tale of the Eunuchs of India. A college teacher in Jhargram (Midnapore District) has, after staying close to them and observing their problems and poverty, has set about trying to bring the eunuchs into the mainstream. But the eunuchs don’t want their profession to go because they will then starve. Quite a number of them have been kidnapped as boys and castrated forcibly.

They are sucked into their profession to make a living and, they say, have something to offer society in "alternative sex". They have a special dialect of their own and links with their community Indiawide. Most of them are not educated but those that have some education are specially angry at the way society treats them.

The academic, who has made a lifetimes study of them, has started a journal, Obmanav, and a front of eunuchs where their views can be expressed. Certainly there is bravery in taking up such an unpopular cause and treating it as a deep-seated social problem and he deserves every praise.

Burmese exiles

The Burmese exiles in India are a neglected community. They deserve much more friendliness and hospitality. A group of them, along with people from neighbouring countries, have started the Mizzima News Agency. I went recently to a three-day conference organised by them with participants from Tibet, Bangladesh, Thailand and, of course, India and Burma.

An elderly and well-known Burmese novelist and short story writer Maung Thara who has become an exile, gave a detailed account of how Burmese censorship works. It was hair-raising. The cost of censorship has to be paid by the writers; delays are infinite, bribery makes passing a work easier. Finally, he said, women censors are more liberal than men.

We should be ashamed of ignoring Burma which spends six times as much on defence as on health, where inflation is 40 per cent and where there is large scale unemployment and forced labour and quite a heavy presence of AIDS.