The untamed archive

Abstract

Interest in the history of colonized areas has always been existent. For utilitarian purposes colonizers wanted to know more about the past of the areas they started to trade with and where they settled themselves. This article is confined to the use of the sources for the writing of history in the Dutch East Indies in the 19^th century. On a limited scale and for diverse purposes, colonial civil servants, scholars and amateur historians started to investigate the history of the colony. This article scrutinizes whether in the 19^th-century Dutch East Indies the European tendency to base history writing on a systematic use of archival sources became in vogue. This question, however, raises immediately some epistemological and practical problems that will be discussed in this article. Was there a similar European concept of archives in the Dutch East Indies? How were indigenous archival sources valued and used? What infrastructure was available to study historical archives? This explorative case study shows how historical interest within a 19^th-century colony got stuck into an almost obsessive collecting of historical archives and other source material as a prerequisite for historical research.

Keywords

archives collectors colonial archives colonial history indigenous sources

Introduction

‘L’Histoire se fait avec des documents’ [History is made with documents] reads the first sentence of the well-known Introduction aux études historiques [Introduction to the Study of History] published by Seignobos and Langlois. The historian Seignobos and the archivist Langlois published their book in 1898 and it clearly reflects the changes that had taken place in the study of history during the preceding decades. In Europe, the 19^th century was the era of the professionalization and scientification of history in which much attention was given to what Dutch historian Huizinga called the ‘intensification of the methodical and critical work of the historian’ (Huizinga, 1937: 18). Since Ranke emphasis was placed on combining and integrating three pre-existing methods: a critical use of sources, the philological method and the use of original documents. The focus on historical archives made a considerable contribution to a more ‘empirical’ study of history. The use of archival sources became a prerequisite for scientific history (Dorsman, 2002: 159–76), and as such became generally accepted in most European countries.

Did this 19^th-century turn to the archive also take place in the Dutch Indies even before the institution Landsarchief [state archive] was established in 1892? In this contribution I want to find out whether the Indies exhibited the same tendency to use archival sources in historical research and the making of history as in Europe. Immediately the question arises of whether the European concept of ‘the archive’ was applicable in the Indies? Did historiographers in the Indies have an interest in archival research for the writing of history?

In this article I first discuss some conceptual problems with the terms ‘history’ and ‘archives’ and before turning to the 19^th-century historiography in the Indies, I give a brief overview of how 19^th-century colonial historians in the Netherlands made use of and how they conceptualized the colonial archive. This is the starting point for examining the meaning and use of the archive in historiography in the Dutch Indies, which I will discuss in two ways. First I will explore how historiographers in the Indies made use of the colonial archive and then I will examine the significance of indigenous sources for historical research and how these were valued.

The context: History and archives

The use of the European concepts ‘history’ and ‘archives’ in studying the making of history in the Dutch East Indies is not without its problems. During 19^th-century European colonial expansion, the different approaches to and traditions of the past became profoundly entwined and it became clear that the past had been written about in a variety of manners. Numerous authors, including H. A. J. Klooster, Araki Nagazumi, Nancy K. Florida, Daniel Woolf and Anthony Milner, have written on the substantial epistemological contrast between the European and indigenous approach to history in the period between 1800 and 1945 in South-east Asia. The indigenous historical tradition of composing chronicles for the construction of the present and to stimulate the magical power of the dynasty – such as the Javanese babads – differs considerably in its purpose and method from the writing of history in the post-Enlightenment West where the focus is on ‘objective representation of past events’ (Florida, 1995: 52). Even in 1921, a member of the People’s Council, the Volksraad, Soetatmo Soeriokoemoeso, characterized the quest for precise information about the past as a typical western requirement that held little value for the people in the Orient. In his view, reconstruction of the past ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ [as it really was] did not have any great value for Indonesians (Klooster, 1985: 184). European historians had (and often still have) difficulties with the indigenous approach to the past, and frequently characterized indigenous history-writing as a kind of pseudo-history.

The problem of appreciating writing on historiography in the East Indies becomes very clear in the book on the development of Indonesian historiography written by H. Klooster. The author acknowledges the existence of a ‘Netherlands East Indies historiography’ as such, which he described very narrow-mindedly, however, as the writings on the history of Indonesia written by non-Indonesians before Indonesian independence. The main reason for excluding Indonesians from this category is that there was barely a single Indonesian who had published about history in a scientific way in the period before 1942 (Klooster, 1985: 13). Hoesein Djajadiningrat’s dissertation (1913) Critische beschouwing van de Sajarah Banten [Critical Consideration of the Sajarah Banten] is generally considered as the starting point of the scientific use of sources by the Indonesians (ibid.: 42), although Djajadiningrat was still more interested in the philological and literary qualities of the chronicles than in the historical value of them (Nagazumi, 2007: 213). It is true, some historians assume that the pujangga ¹ or court literator Ranggawarsita (1802–73) of the kraton [palace] of Surakarta was the first Javanese court poet to write history based on a critical survey of the sources² thanks to his intensive contacts with Dutch Javanologists, but their arguments are not very convincing. His writings were still based on legendary sources with an imaginary chronology. As Nancy Florida asserts, it is more correct to revere Ranggawarsita as the last of the true court poets (Florida, 1995: 21). As the western idea of history was so fundamentally different from the indigenous idea of history, it was the European, mainly Dutch, historians who set the scene in scientific historiography before 1942. Studying the use of archives in the process of historical research is therefore – I would say almost by its very nature – restricted to the western tradition and in the 19^th century this means in fact western historiographers. There is therefore no choice but to limit this article to western historiographers.

The concept of the ‘archive’ is probably even more problematic than the concept of ‘history’ due to the controversy surrounding the definition of an archive, which was already being debated in the 19^th century (Moore, 2008: 197–236), and because of the epistemological structure of the archive as well as its being a place, an institution and a collection of documents. There are numerous ways to describe the ‘archive’ but as Derrida states ‘[n]othing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word “archive”’(Derrida, 1995: 90). The term ‘archive’ oscillates between the poles of the physical or material and the concept or idea. Archives are physical places of custody where the authenticity of the archival documents is secured and guaranteed. The moment a document passes over the ‘archival threshold’ entails the admission of the document into a ‘depository of truth’ (Duranti, 2007: 450). Archives are regarded as important places of knowledge, which, however, do not simply record the past but also constitute the past or, as Stoler puts it, ‘new social categories were the archives’ product as much as subjects of them’ (Stoler, 2009: 43). They have acquired an authenticating function in the academic writing of history since the 19^th century. Archives are seen as depositories of evidence and they represent a ‘second moment in ending instability, in creating stasis and the fixing of meaning and knowledge when the evidence it houses is deployed in historical narratives’ (Harris, 2002: 161). In the course of the 19^th century, the new professionals who called themselves archivists based their definition of archive not on the depository but on certain specific features of documents. While libraries contained documents about the past, ‘archives contained the “true” and “original” remnants of the past itself’ (Moore, 2008: 216). The 19^th-century debate about what constituted an archive created strong responses among archivists. When 19^th-century historians used the word ‘archive’, they were generally referring to the entirety of written documents, the primary sources of history. They distinguished between ‘pure sources’ and ‘impure sources’. Pure sources were documents like deeds, treaties, laws and regulations, whose role as historical evidence and credibility was beyond dispute because they were products of public authority (ibid.: 212–15; Groen van Prinsterer, 1830: 7–9). Most historians considered private letters and family documents as archives; archivists did not. Archivists in the 19^th century developed a formalistic, bureaucratic view of an archive, which consisted of documents ‘officially received or produced by an administrative body or one of its officials’ (Muller, Feith and Fruin, 2003: 13). The somewhat artificial distinction between administrative archives and private papers did not mean archivists disputed the historical relevance of the latter; nevertheless they argued that these documents should not be placed in an archive but in a library (ibid.: 153). Despite the theoretical delineation of what an archive was, in practice what actually happened was often different. Even the formal 19^th-century state archives contained large numbers of family papers.

Grounded in a 19^th-century positivist view, archivists delineated an archive as a living organism with its ‘own personality’. Because the archive consisted of documents connected to those officials who created them, archivists stressed the importance of understanding the ‘organic whole’ of the archival collections. If the activities of the creating body changed, the nature of the archive changed likewise (Muller, Feith and Fruin, 2003: 19). The ascribed quality of the archive as a ‘living organism’ created opportunities to draw close to the past. But, of course, no archive contains all the possible fragments of history and for this the archive is, in the words of Foucault, not a material concept but ‘the general system of the formation and the transformation of statements’ (Foucault, 2004: 146). The implication of this notion becomes clear when he explains it as follows:

…[b]etween the language…that defines the system of constructing possible sentences, and the corpus that passively collects the words that are spoken, the archive defines a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated. (Foucault, 2004: 146)

The archive is more than the sum of the fragments. It is a system of creating meaning based on the fragments that are kept and collected. Or, as Achille Mbembe puts it: ‘[t]he final destination of the archive is…always situated outside its own materiality, in the story that it makes possible’ (Mbembe, 2002: 21).

Although all these different concepts may at first sight have a blurring effect on the meaning of the archive, the opposite is actually true. The different concepts together make clear that the archive only has a real meaning in interaction with the users and the use they make of the documents kept there. The documents collected and stored in a safe depository are a precondition for the writing of real history or, in other words, they are crucial to be able ‘to find out the truth of the stories told’ and ‘to understand the developments of our past society’ (Blok, 1891: 180). Because the archive’s user ‘does not enter the archive naked, but clothed in all sorts of theories, concepts and suppositions’, it is the user of the archive who determines to a great extent the meaning of the archive (Ankersmit, 1984: 100–1).

Colonial history in the Netherlands

Most of the small group of historians who studied the history of the East Indies in the 19^th century worked in the Netherlands and produced a so-called colonial history. Their historical interest and historical approach were rooted in and based on the colonial relationship between the mother country and the colony. According to archivist and historian Meilink-Roelofsz, we speak of real colonial history only after the VOC archives were transferred to the state archives in 1856 (Meilink-Roelofsz, 1970). Subsequently, historians were able to explore these archives and they set the scene of 19^th-century Netherlands East Indies historiography.

The largest archival project on colonial history that had been accomplished in the Netherlands in the 19^th century was without doubt the publication of VOC sources by J. K. J. de Jonge. The first volume of this gigantic work of a total 17 volumes, which was somehow given the misleading title of De opkomst van het Nederlandsch gezag in Nederlandsch-Indie [The Rise of Dutch Power in the Netherlands East Indies], was published in 1862 and the last one in 1909. The work covered the period from 1595 until 1810. It is an excellent example of how 19^th-century archivists tried to facilitate historians by publishing a selection of important documents. De Jonge was aware of the unbalanced (Dutch) approach taken by this source publication for a proper understanding of the past of the Netherlands East Indies. It was for this reason that he urged historians who wanted to write an exhaustive history of the Netherlands East Indies not only to use the Dutch archives, but also to make use of available indigenous sources. Without praising the quality of these indigenous sources, he wrote: ‘it is nevertheless true that –as long as these are consulted with acuteness and caution – we can learn a lot from these sources about the intercourse and mutual relations of the indigenous peoples’ (De Jonge, 1862: iii). He encouraged scholars who combined history with the study of the languages and archaeology of the Netherlands East Indies to publish the indigenous sources of knowledge in the same way as he had started to do in the Netherlands. Only then would historians be able to acquire the knowledge required to be able to write a balanced history of the Netherlands East Indies. De Jonge’s source publication was a state-of-the-art example of 19^th-century archival work that favoured scientific history. His erudite work can be seen as a reference point for exploring the situation in the Indies. In the subsequent paragraphs, I first want to examine the activities of the so-called ‘official historians’, who were appointed by the colonial government to write an encompassing history of the Indies, and I compare their activities and position vis-à-vis independent researchers. How did these various kinds of historiographer define their position with regard to the archive? How did they make use of the archive? Second I want to investigate how successive history writers in the Indies looked at, and made use of, indigenous sources.

History-writing in the East Indies

What was the situation with regard to the study of the past in the East Indies? The question of whether there was a growing interest in studying history based on the archives kept on site in the colony itself has seldom been raised. On the contrary, for a long time studying history from the perspective of the colony had been regarded as almost non-existent. At best, the products of colonial history produced in the mother country were imported into the colony. The colony itself seemed to have had no interest at all in historians who wrote their narratives based on archival research in the colony (Drooglever, 1985: 119–38). However, there are indications that this picture needs some readjustment.

Historiography of the colonial state

In 1940, the then archivist of the East Indies in Batavia, F. R. J. Verhoeven, published an interesting article about the ‘four official historians of the Netherlands-East Indies’ who had studied the history of the East Indies professionally because they were appointed as ‘official historians’ by the government (Verhoeven, 1940a: 116–31). This interest by the colonial government in the history of the colony started after the East Indies were returned to the Dutch in 1816. For political and administrative reasons there was a growing need to have correct and reliable (historical) data of the colonial dominions and the VOC and the colonial archives became an important source. Commissioner-General Leonard du Bus de Gisignies (1780–1848) decided in May 1827 that ‘from all statistical surveys that came in at the government’s office in early times and from all statistical surveys that still will be received, a general statistical history of the Island of Java and subordinates should be composed’.³ This resulted in what can best be characterized as utilitarian historiography for the sake of reinforcing colonial policy.

The first official to be appointed historian of the Netherlands East Indies was a Protestant minister, Guillaume de Serière (1788–1869), who had lived in the East Indies since 1821 and had been working in Zutphen as a teacher of geography and history. As early as 1823 he had produced a report for the colonial government about the unfavourable state of the VOC archives in the East Indies, and he gave the government some recommendations on how to improve the management of the archives (Verhoeven, 1940b: 476–9). Although he undeniably had some scientific interest in the history of the East Indies, his career as official historian was only short-lived. In 1829 he switched to the Interior Administration, became assistant-resident of Krawang in West Java and finally ended as governor of the Moluccas (Fasseur, 1997: 43–61). In 1832 Germain Felix Meylan, a self-taught historiographer, was appointed as his successor. He had been head of the Dutch trading mission in Decima between 1826 and 1830 and had published a Geschiedkundig overzigt van den handel der Europezen op Japan [Historical Survey of European Trade with Japan] in 1830 for which he made use of archival sources. Meylan, however, would never be able to start his work as historian of the Netherlands East Indies. He died, even before he was able to take over the notes made by De Serière (Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indie [hereafter cited as TNI] [1865]: 331–2). Jan Michiel van Beusechem (1775–1847), who at the same time was president of the Board of Justice in Batavia, became the successor of De Serière. He managed to produce a handwritten historical survey of 170 pages, which he declared ‘for the largest part was drawn on the government archives’ and some interviews with local witnesses which nowadays would probably have been labelled as ‘oral history’ and he promised a, never written, second part.⁴

The fourth ‘official historian’, Wolter Robert Baron Van Hoëvell (1812–79) was the most notable, most professional and most self-willed (but, for the authorities, also the most troublesome) of these four historians. It was not the government but the Protestant minister Van Hoëvell himself who took the initiative to continue the work on the history of the East Indies. Just one year after he had arrived in the East Indies, he wrote an extensive request to the government in which he expounded his ideas of writing the history of the Netherlands East Indies, which he defined as ‘a continuous story of the remarkable events that have happened in the countries East of Cape Good Hope that once belonged (or still do) to the Dutch dominions from the earliest days until the present’. He explained that only ‘those events which caused some major changes or exerted some influence on the fate of these regions’ belong to the realm of history. History-writing in his eyes was not a chronological enumeration of events, but a science that ‘explains the causes and effects of the events’ (quoted in Verhoeven, 1940a: 126).

Thanks to the strong support of the Secretary-General, J. P. Cornets de Groot, Van Hoëvell was appointed in December 1838 as the fourth official historian of the Netherlands East Indies and he was, with the exception of fulfilling his preaching engagements, exempted from his regular duties. Van Hoëvell started to carry out his research and although he never finished his magnum opus on the history of the Netherlands East Indies, he wrote and published many smaller studies. His ‘Ontwerp eener te vervaardigen Geschiedenis van Neêrland’s Indie’ [Plan for Writing a History of the Netherlands East Indies] gives a good picture of his research plans. He intended to write a history of the impact of the Dutch on the inhabitants of the East Indies. In 1840 he obtained permission from the government to make a tour through Java to trace different sources and to consult indigenous experts. He was even given a letter of recommendation from the government to gain access to the sultan of Sumenep (Madura), of whom he had high expectations (Kappelhof, 2009: 6).

Van Hoëvell was a politically and culturally engaged and versatile personality. During the 11 years he spent in the East Indies he not only served Batavia’s Malay congregation and studied the history of the Netherlands East Indies, he also was president of the Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen [Batavia Society of Arts and Science], and founder and editor of the Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië [Journal for the Netherlands East Indies]; he made several scientific tours in the East Indies and became one of the strongest critics of the colonial government. After a serious dispute with the governor-general he was forced to leave the colony in 1848. With the departure of Van Hoëvell, the era of officially appointed history writers also came to an end, but this by no means meant the end of the utilitarian-focused history-writing and use of the archives in the East Indies. In 1867, for instance, a member of the Council of the Netherlands Indies, Otto van Rees (1823–92), was asked to investigate the origins of the Preanger agricultural system, which was based on forced labour. He used not only the colonial archive, but also sources of ‘indigenous origin’ such as babads and piagems (Van Rees, 1880: 14). Even J. A. van der Chijs (1831–1905), who in 1892 was appointed as the first Landsarchivaris [state archivist of the Indies], had begun his career in the Indies 30 years before as a civil servant who was entrusted with compiling historical surveys on important administrative issues (Jaquet and Ribberink, 1992: 10). In some cases the Bataviaasch Genootschap was given permission to publish the results of these administrative-oriented historical researches.

Independent historiography

Despite complaints about the lack of historians and the lack of an audience for written history, a small group of independent historiographers did exist. One of the most active, but at the same time controversial, historians in the East Indies was Johannes Hageman (1817–71). Later historians never knew exactly how to deal with him, mainly because he was not very clear about his sources. Hageman published many books and articles about various topics, but all related to the Netherlands East Indies. During his life he was already controversial and not very popular in the circles of the ‘established scholars’. In the extensive letters he wrote to the board of directors of the Bataviaasch Genootschap he appears as a person who always seemed to feel wronged and who lacked the much-needed recognition of the ‘real’ scholars. In the detailed reviews he wrote on published books or articles, he often accused authors of publishing things he had already found out much earlier.⁵

Hageman went first as a soldier to the East Indies in the 1830s, but in 1836 he switched to the civil service in Surabaya. After he was married in 1860, he was able to ‘lead a carefree life’ (Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek [hereafter cited as NNBW] 1911: 1019). He resigned and spent the rest of his life on historical research and writing. Hageman can be characterized as a historiographer who was convinced of the importance of investigating the archives because ’a treasure of knowledge is buried in the lofts of the offices in Soerabaya, Grisee, Passaroewan, Banjoewangs, Soemenap, Bankalan and Bawaeas and only little from the last century is known‘.⁶ It was, however, far from easy to use the archives in the East Indies. In contrast to the four privileged official historians and other government-based researchers who had full access to the official archives kept by the government, historiographers like Hageman were by no means automatically allowed access to these archives. The archives kept by the colonial government were like impregnable bastions. Making public information extracted from government documents without explicit consent was regarded as theft (Royal Decree, 13 January 1854, no. 64; Veth, 1848). In his correspondence with the Dutch Javanologist P. J. Veth, Hageman referred more than once to these absurd restrictions imposed by the government. Hageman provided Veth with all kinds of data he extracted from the archives, and in delivering some details he wrote ironically: ’You should read this in isolation, in secrecy, with double doors, closed behind lattice-work, because this touches the paper decision that designates us as thieves when we stir the archive.’⁷

An interesting peculiarity was Hageman’s attempt to write a complete history by using Dutch-colonial and indigenous archives. He valued the indigenous sources as highly as the Dutch colonial archives. How did historiographers in the 19^th-century Netherlands East Indies deal with indigenous sources?

Hunting for indigenous sources

In this second part I shift my focus to the indigenous sources. Were indigenous texts considered as being part of ‘the archive’ to be studied for historical purposes? With the establishment of the Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen in 1778, scholarly interest in the colony entered a new phase. The main objectives of the Bataviaasch Genootschap were ‘ploughing and cultivating the field of knowledge’ and ‘sowing and planting in the garden of literature and the arts’,⁸ which – in the tradition of the Enlightenment – were carried out mainly by collecting and studying objects related to natural history, antiquities, customs and traditions. In the official programme of the society, great importance was attached to making use of indigenous knowledge by involving natives. The only way to improve knowledge about the real situation of these territories was to utilize native informants (Groot, 2009: 94–5).

Thomas Stamford Raffles

Although the establishment of the society created a kind of framework for conducting historical research, it would take another few decades before the dormant interest in using indigenous sources for writing history was put into practice. It was Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826), who became president of the Bataviaasch Genootschap in January 1813, that was given the credit for having taken indigenous accounts, manuscripts and inscriptions as valuable sources for the writing of history.⁹ H. Klooster characterized him as the first European historiographer with Javanese sympathies who probably hardly used Dutch sources because of his anti-Dutch feelings (Klooster, 1985: 18). H. de Graaf praised Raffles because it was through his work that much historical data and traditional knowledge from the Babad Tanah Djawi [Javanese State Chronicles] became known to the world (De Graaf, 2007: 120). Raffles indeed seemed to have been proud of his use of indigenous sources. In his History of Java, published in two volumes in 1817, he writes:

In the archives [author’s italics] of the princes of Java, histories of their country are deposited, extending from a remote antiquity to the latest date. It is principally from abstracts of these, made at my request, in three different parts of the country, by the Panambáhan of Súmenap,¹⁰ the late Kidi Adipati of Demak, and the secretary of the Pangéran Adipáti of Súra-kérta, all distinguished among their countrymen for literary attainments, that the two following chapters have been compiled. Copies, versions, and detached fragments of history are found in the possession of every family of distinction. Of these I have occasionally availed myself. (Raffles, 1817: II, 64)

Furthermore, he explains that he made use of the babads, created by the ‘native princes and chiefs [who] have been in the habit of keeping a register of the principal events, in the form of a chronological table’ (Raffles, 1817: 64).

Donald E. Weatherbee, however, has convincingly shown in his analysis of Raffles’ History of Java that Raffles relied much more on and ‘borrowed’ much more from earlier Dutch sources than he had wanted to admit in his book (Weatherbee, 1978: 63–98). Notwithstanding the appropriate criticism of his gullible use of his sources in later years (De Gasparis, 1962; De Graaf, 1962), the virtue of Raffles’ book still can be appreciated as a plea for an ‘archival approach’ in the writing of indigenous history. His attempt to make use of indigenous sources can be seen as an important step in the discourse on the writing of colonial history. Once Raffles’ History of Java became an authoritative work, it was almost impossible to write a history of the East Indies without paying any attention to indigenous sources.

The use of the word ‘archival’ should, however, be employed with some reserve. There was no institutional infrastructure in the form of archive repositories at all for historians who wanted to make use of indigenous manuscripts and, compared with the situation in Europe, there were no attempts to make any systematic survey of available indigenous sources.¹¹ Individual historiographers tried to identify and collect indigenous documents, which was an exciting and sometimes hazardous undertaking that had much in common with the exploratory expeditions into undiscovered areas or the collection of unknown species of plants and animals, and could not be compared with the developing archival and historical infrastructure in Europe. Tracing relevant indigenous sources in the East Indies would not undergo any great change during the 19^th century.

Colin Mackenzie

Archival depositories were absent from the Indies. Historians who wanted to use manuscripts and archival documents first needed literally to hunt for them. Raffles was in the position to organize a team of assistants who provided him with the information he needed for his work. Among his collectors of information was the famous Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Mackenzie (1754–1821), who compiled during the two years of his stay on Java no less than 35 volumes of manuscripts in the Dutch language, some being translated from the Javanese and 177 ‘sections rather than volumes of paper…written in the characters of Java and of Malay, but all in the Javanese language’ (Weatherbee, 1978: 65). In fact he was one of the numerous collectors of indigenous sources, whose activities ultimately resulted in the colonization of large parts of the indigenous archive. Mackenzie spent most of his life as a cartographer and a surveyor in India, and he had an insatiable interest in the history, ethnology and religion of the people who lived in the areas where he worked. In gathering information, he relied almost exclusively on local assistants and informants, and he understood that writing Indian history could not be detached from the Indians who produced it (Breckenridge and Van der Veer, 1993: 281–2). When he moved to Java in July 1811, he just went on collecting information as he had previously in India. He compiled a questionnaire to be sent to anyone who might have information about Java to locate the places where inscriptions could be found and determine whether translations were available. In November 1811 he departed for a 9-months tour of Java to make his inquiries, and spent a great deal of time in the kratons and courts of indigenous rulers. In his private papers he sometimes gave a detailed account of how he collected the manuscripts: ‘some were saved from the wreck of the Sultan’s library at the storm of the Craton of Djocjacarta…, others were purchased and collected on tour through that island; some were presented by Dutch colonists and regents, and others are transcripts by Javanese writers…to copy them from the originals in the lands of the regents and with their permission’ (Weatherbee, 1978: 65). Mackenzie was, however, more a collector of indigenous archives and manuscripts than a scholar who was able to use these documents for history-writing. His attempts to penetrate into the indigenous courts to collect information are exemplary for all historiographers who wanted to use indigenous sources in the 19^th century.

Dutch interest in indigenous sources

From the Dutch side there were generally speaking three different forms of interest in indigenous sources in the 19^th century: from the Javanologists and other linguists who worked in an archaeological tradition; from individuals, predominantly colonial servants who had knowledge of or had interest in the past of the country they lived in; and from the third group, which consisted of researchers who came closest to what we now describe as (self-taught) historians. It is, however, interesting to see that all these different approaches converged in the Bataviaasch Genootschap. Reading the correspondence and minutes of the meetings of the board of this society gives a detailed and fascinating picture of the many initiatives that were taken to gain access to the indigenous past of the country.

The linguistic interest in indigenous sources

The importance of the work of linguists for the scientific use of indigenous sources should not be underestimated. After all they produced the dictionaries and they created the possibilities to study the Javanese, Sundanese or Balinese languages, for instance, and by doing so offered the purely technical means or even more the necessities for those who wanted to study the indigenous sources from a historical perspective. In 1847 the German linguist J. F. C. Gericke (1799–1857), who spent most of his life in the East Indies, and Taco Roorda (1801–74), who is regarded as the real founder of Javanology in the Netherlands – although he himself never set foot in the Netherlands East Indies – published a Javanese dictionary. These tools not only stimulated scientific study of the Javanese language but also made the existing Javanese source materials more or less accessible at the same time (Berg, 1962: 164). It was not the historians but the linguists themselves who were initially the most important users of indigenous sources. Linguists needed to study and to compare historical texts for a better understanding of the historical development of the indigenous languages.¹² They meticulously studied and deciphered every text fragment they managed to trace, sometimes in the form of manuscripts, but more often in the form of inscriptions discovered during archaeological excavations.¹³ Sometimes they went to the archaeological sites in person, but more frequently they hired indigenous writers to produce a facsimile. When photography became a reliable alternative, some scholars preferred to receive pictures instead of handwritten facsimiles to decipher texts because, as linguist Neubronner van der Tuuk observed, ‘sometimes the native copyists see a character where in reality there is just a small hole’.¹⁴

As W. P. Coolhaas already has pointed out, a yawning chasm existed between the approach of the linguists who were also interested in historical and cultural research and the historians. Linguists were almost exclusively interested in pre-Islamic times while historians seldom worked on topics earlier than 1500 (Coolhaas, 1951: 146–7). It is impossible within the scope of this article to give a complete overview of the linguistic approach or to discuss all the different linguists who used the indigenous sources. The most influential of these were H. Neubronner van der Tuuk (1824–94), characterized as a buccaneer (Groot, 2009: 438) and brilliant enfant terrible in Austronesian linguistics (Fasseur, 2003: 147), J. H. C. Kern (1833–1917), who became one of the pioneers of comparative Indonesian linguistics, old Javanese and epigraphy (De Gasparis, 1962: 123), and J. L. A. Brandes (1857–1905), who was a genius in tracing and collecting unknown sources in the East Indies. But there were many others who were characterized by H. J. Heeren as ‘the forgotten predecessors of Indonesian archaeology’ (Heeren, 1954: 673–83).

It is important to notice that the Bataviaasch Genootschap served as a kind of bridge between the archaeological-linguistic approach and the historical method in the use of original documents. This bridge was based on collecting all kinds of indigenous manuscripts. In the middle of the 19^th century, the society held approximately 750 indigenous manuscripts in its collection, but the board of directors was worried about the slow growth of this number. The Bataviaasch Genootschap started to pay more attention to bringing together and preserving the widely scattered manuscripts in the East Indies because they were regarded as essential for studying Indian languages and indigenous history. When the painter Raden Saleh (c. 1807–80) offered his help to collect manuscripts and other antiquities during an arts tour he planned to make on Java in 1865–6, the Bataviaasch Genootschap responded very enthusiastically and regarded his offer as a welcome attempt to enlarge the ‘indeed very backward collection of manuscripts’.¹⁵ Raden Saleh returned with no less than 150 antiquities and 38 manuscripts written on palm leaves (Groot, 2009: 491). In that same year the board of directors of the society sent the governor-general a request in which it asked permission to transfer the Malay and Arabic manuscripts, which were kept in the archives of the General Secretariat, to the collection of the society. According to the board the manuscripts would be in their rightful place in the society’s library. The request was refused because it would hamper the administrative work of the civil servants who were in charge of indigenous affairs.¹⁶ In spite of all the initiatives taken to extend the collection of indigenous manuscripts, the activities employed by the Bataviaasch Genootschap leave the impression of a short-term and ad hoc focus, with little coordination. The quality of the research depended on a very small number of well-trained linguists educated in the Netherlands. This group was too small to trace the really important documents in a systematic way. What was traced was mostly the result of sheer luck. J. H. C. Kern suggested to the board of the Bataviaasch Genootschap that talented indigenous students should be selected for studying their mother tongue and maybe even another native language as a means to stimulate the study of indigenous languages and history and to enlarge the number of educated people who could carry out this kind of work in this field of linguistics. In the opinion of Kern, these young indigenous students ‘should be placed under the supervision of a doctor in the Polynesian languages or another scientist [in the East Indies] to receive a systematic education for about two years and to learn basic skills: editing of not too complicated texts, making glossaries, tracing and collecting unfamiliar manuscripts and making adequate translations of these indigenous handwritten texts’.¹⁷

History buffs, historians and amateur historians

There always had been Europeans who were simply intrigued by the otherness of the people they lived with. Sometimes they tried to gratify this curiosity by studying indigenous culture and history. Civil servants, in particular, who had a close relationship with indigenous people, sometimes had access to valuable indigenous documents, which they then collected. One of the most famous collectors and lovers of indigenous history was probably Nicolaus Engelhard (1761–1831), the former VOC governor of Java’s East Coast. Engelhard collected archaeological artefacts, but also gathered documents, translated them and used them purely for improving his own knowledge. By pure coincidence it became known that these ‘history buffs’ studied and sometimes even possessed valuable indigenous documents themselves. In the correspondence of the Bataviaasch Genootschap, we may encounter many of these amateurs who translated diaries, letters, or manuscripts written by indigenous elites.¹⁸

These history buffs not only had a personal interest in the indigenous cultures, but also tried to publish their findings and writings in the Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap [Transactions of the Batavian Society] or in the Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indie. Of the 221 articles published in the Transactions of the Bataviaasch Genootschap between 1781 and 1889, 26 are on historical subjects (Lian and van der Veer, 1973: 22). As early as the first volume of the transactions, Josua van Iperen (1726–80) discussed the meaning of Javanese historical sources and the importance of collecting them (van Iperen, 1825[1781]: 134–72). Protestant minister Brumund wrote a short survey of Javanese historical sources in his Bijdrage tot de kennis van het Hindoeisme op Java [Contributions to the Knowledge of Hinduism in Java] (Brumund, 1868: 1–309). K. F. Holle (1829–96) published some Kawi records from the 9th and 14th centuries about gifts of land, taxation and religious rites (Holle, 1880: 1–9), while others published the genealogies of Javanese kings (Anon., 1826: 333–9) or published, annotated and discussed babads, such as the Babad Tanah Djawi and the Babad Pasir (Knebel, 1898). On the other hand, the Bataviaasch Genootschap attempted to stimulate the study of indigenous history. For example, in 1823, it set up a competition in which entrants were asked to write ‘a continuous historical survey’ beginning in the years prior to the arrival of the Dutch in Java based on 16th- and 17th-century indigenous Javanese writings. The aim was to find out what measures the indigenous rulers took to combat the Dutch. Furthermore the Bataviaasch Genootschap tried to stimulate a systematic study of Javanese writings in order to establish the historical basis for rumours that 16th-century Javanese fortune-tellers had predicted the arrival of a ‘foreign nation from far away, white of colour with cat-eyes, red hair and big noses’, who would take power (Anon., 1823: xix–xx).

All these attempts to use indigenous sources are primarily examples of hunting for indigenous knowledge.

As these attempts to stimulate the use of indigenous sources clearly show, the Rankean ideal of critically using a tamed archive, well arranged and described and to be used in a scholarly environment, was still a distant one in the Indies. This became crystal clear when Dutch historian Rouffaer started his archival investigations in the Indies following European lines of historical research.

Gerret Pieter Rouffaer

On 5 November 1885, Gerret Pieter Rouffaer (1860–1928) arrived in Batavia, with the intention of making a ‘pleasure trip on Java and the outer dominions for about eight months’ (Krom, 1928: 179). He was to stay for 5 years, however, initially because he became infatuated with the idea of writing a history of the influence of Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820–87), the former Dutch colonial servant and influential writer who denounced the abuses of Dutch colonialism in his book Max Havelaar under the pen name of Multatuli. The more he studied the Havelaar case, however, the more he felt the need to study the history of the ‘one issue that surpasses all other questions in a manner that it can be denominated as the issue on Java: the agrarian’.¹⁹ Within the context of the issue I discuss here, Rouffaer is a very interesting historian, who started his research with a European model in mind: visiting the places where the archives were kept, taking notes and writing his narrative. Reality became, however, very different, especially because he did not want to confine himself to the European colonial archives, but wanted to combine them with indigenous sources. In the end he surrendered to the unstructured archival jungle in the Indies and started to do what most historians in the Indies did: tracing and collecting information.

Rouffaer passionately started to collect archival material that could shed light on the agrarian legal situation in the principalities and made an ‘archival tour’ on Java that started in June 1887 in Solo and ended in Klaten (Soerakarta) in February 1890. In between he spent a full year in Jogjakarta, stayed for several months in Rembang and made a trip to Bali (Krom, 1928: 203). His archival research is well documented because of his lively correspondence with Jan Laurens Andries Brandes (1857–1905), who was appointed as government philologist in Batavia in 1885 and had the same voracious interest in tracing manuscripts and inscriptions as Rouffaer had. In his letters, Rouffaer gives a detailed account of how he collected his archival material. He lamented to Brandes: ‘[W]hat are actually the sources for knowing the agrarian situation in early times?…Only the VOC archives give some scattered remarks on the agrarian situation, while the indigenous sources, as far as I know, were completely missing.’²⁰ Some months later he sounds much more optimistic. He wrote to Brandes that he had already been working in the residence archives in Solo for two months – ’this archive was very badly infested by bandjir [flood] and stinks’ ²¹ – and he was very pleased because he even obtained permission from Resident Spaan to work in the secret archives, where he found many relevant details. Thanks to the help of translator Van den Berg, he had at his disposal three writers from the translation office for a few weeks and he writes in a happy mood to Brandes: ‘It will be clear to you that a lot can be copied in this way.’²² Writing about his findings in the Solo archives, he stated satisfactorily: ‘Apparently a mass of unknown is hidden.’²³

Rouffaer, however, did not confine himself to what was kept in the official Dutch colonial archives, but also tried to gain access to Javanese sources kept by the local priyayis [noblemen; literally ‘younger brothers’ of the sovereign]. He had even decided to learn Javanese (which he actually never did) because he grew more and more convinced that mastering the language would help him extract more detail from the important Javanese documents and would make him less dependent on translators. He explains at great length how he relied on the help of the native, East Indies-born Eurasian translator Van den Berg, and he depicts their strategies to find relevant archival material in an animated way:

Once we hear from one or another person that some documents might be kept somewhere, we go there and he [Van den Berg] introduces me in his role of translator. His appearance exerts a certain influence, an influence that is the stronger when the priyayis we visit also have to deal with him in his official capacity and want to try to get in his good graces. After a certain while, when the political talk about this and that comes to an end, I start to say something that has to do with the purpose of our visit…In this way hardly ever, no visit ever failed up to now…Once we enjoy the confidence of natives, they show a generosity I wish to praise. They immediately give the documents without embarrassment – while most Eurasians and full-blood Europeans would try to make money out of it.²⁴

But at the same time he complained about this time-consuming method. He had to make many visits to these priyayis and every visit ‘takes 3 to 4 hours before a document is finally extracted’.²⁵

It is interesting to see how Rouffaer’s professional attitude toward Brandes changed during this period. Until June 1888 he sent almost all his findings immediately to Brandes, who could benefit from Rouffaer’s detective work. But Rouffaer had to admit that since he started his research on the agrarian issue on Java, he felt ‘the spur of scientific egoism, namely the desire to have the exclusive credits of publishing the unknown documents I discovered’.²⁶ Although Rouffaer would continue to exchange documents with Brandes until the latter died in 1905, he would be much more selective than before.

After Rouffaer returned to the Netherlands in February 1890 – ‘dangerously ill with malaria’²⁷ – he continued to write to Brandes about his historical research and working methods in the East Indies. Rouffaer was convinced that no important indigenous documents were to be found in Jogjakarta, but rather more in Solo, and he sighed: ‘If only we could penetrate into the kraton’s kaboedjanggan [library] or in case it has fallen apart, to know where the rest can be found.’²⁸ In a detailed letter written in 1893 and sent by registered mail ‘because of the intimate statements’, Rouffaer advised Brandes how the latter should behave to acquire access successfully to indigenous documents and information. As he had mentioned earlier, ‘it doesn’t make any sense to write to them [indigenous elites], but you need to visit them personally’ if you want to get any information.²⁹ He emphasized the importance of being introduced to the local priyayis by translator Van den Berg. ‘Never forget this! Only after you are more confident with a native, can you visit him by yourself, but the first and second visit should be done under the supervision of the translator and he must introduce you to the native. The higher rank the native has in Solo’s community, the more important this will be.’³⁰

Collecting ‘archives’ versus writing history

This article aims to investigate whether there was a comparable trend in the 19^th-century East Indies to use archival sources in historical research, as perceived in most European countries. From the previous pages it is clear that there was a growing interest in the East Indies to study – and especially to collect – archival sources, but at the same time it is obvious that there were substantial differences compared with the situation in the Netherlands. On an institutional level the East Indies lacked an archival infrastructure until, in 1892, the Landsarchief (state archive) was established. However, apart from the Bataviaasch Genootschap, there were no collecting and preserving ‘archival’ institutions in the Indies. In contrast to Europe there was no conceptual thinking about what kinds of documents belonged to the archive. Researchers were interested in written sources: documents and files created by colonial government institutions (which were usually labelled as archives) and indigenous documents, papers and manuscripts that were written by and belonged to the indigenous elites. In comparison with Europe there was no domestic academic tradition in the Indies and the critical study of the sources was less developed. The Bataviaasch Genootschap provided the intellectual framework in the main but there were hardly professional historians who autonomously worked and reflected on the history of the Netherlands East Indies. The most autonomous scholars in the East Indies were the linguists, and, although they had a growing interest in studying the archival sources, their scope was limited to the indigenous manuscripts for the purpose of studying and deciphering the indigenous languages. Nevertheless they were the important promoters behind tracing, collecting and using indigenous manuscripts and archives and in the end their work was favourable for the study of history. One may wonder why historians in the East Indies did not manage to produce historical narratives. What was the reason for this? We have seen there were maybe not many, but at least some ‘historians’ in the Indies like Van Hoëvell and Rouffaer who intended to write histories and some others like Raffles and Hageman really did. In the following paragraph I want to reflect on their accomplishments.

As already mentioned, the Batavia Society of Arts and Science was the sole ‘scientific’ institute in the East Indies and it was based on a European model of the learned societies. Collecting, studying, discussing and publishing were the main activities of these European scientific societies and the Batavia society shared the same purpose. In their collecting activities, these 18th-century societies can be seen as the forerunners of museums and they created permanent locations of storage for what Wolfgang Ernst calls ‘mechanical, externally preserved, archival memory’ (Ernst, 2000: 21). The 19^th-century making of history in the Indies in many cases went no further than collecting fragments of the past and in my observation there was a clear reason for this. To be able to understand this 19^th-century obsession of collecting historical artefacts and manuscripts and the absence of real historical research or writing of historical narratives in the Indies, it is necessary to pay some attention to the relation between history and memory. Pierre Nora made a clear distinction between primary or true memory and secondary or archival memory. True memory, according to Nora, ‘has taken refuge in gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body’s inherent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories’ (Nora, 1989: 13). Archival memory, on the other hand, is a memory that relies entirely on the materiality of the traces: ‘[t]he less memory is experienced from the inside, the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs’ (ibid.). Although Nora developed his thoughts within a European context, his ideas are valuable for a good understanding of the mechanisms of history-making in the Indies. In Europe he observed a declining vigour of true memory, which was compensated by the creation of artificial memories composed of artefacts from the past. What was true in Europe was even truer for the Europeans in colonial societies. While Nora stressed the mechanism of declining true memory, this mechanism did not exist at all in the Indies. The European colonial population hardly experienced any organic connection to the past of the country, for the simple reason of their outsider position and outsider perspective. What Susan Crane assumes to be true for 19^th-century Europe, where the ‘organic connection to the past had been lost and only ruins remained, and if the perception of the historical was more ephemeral than the physical existence of historical relics, then the collected objects had to be used to establish a firm grasp on the awakened, persuasive historical consciousness of the collectors’ (Crane, 2000: 37), differed in the Indies, where the dependency on collectible fragments of the past was much larger. Because of the absence of the organic connection, the creation of a ‘fund of historical objects, an archive’ (ibid.) was necessary to be able to write any narrative. In Europe it was increasingly the institutions (the museums, libraries and archives) that collected and preserved the (documentary) legacy; in the Indies this was done by the 19^th-century historians themselves. They collected historical fragments in the form of artefacts or manuscripts or through the preservation of ruins. Although some historians, such as Van Hoëvell or Rouffaer, had ambitious plans to write histories, they never accomplished their plans for the simple reason that they were forced to spend most of their time tracing and collecting. They collected materials, combing the places where relics of the past were to be expected, but foundered in processing these fragments, because they lacked any organic connection to this past itself and were not able to put these fragments from the created archives into a meaningful context. Only those who treated the available traces from the past – the historical sources – in a rather uncritical way, as Raffles and Hageman did, were able to write narratives largely based on indigenous archival documents. However, they were in no uncertain terms the target of strong criticism from contemporaries.³¹

Afterword

Certainly, there were some researchers who used archives for the autonomous study of the history of the East Indies. Most of them were historians by accident, and what is most striking is the predominant attention given by them to the history of Java, while the outer dominions received much less attention. Some of these historians tried to make use of indigenous and colonial archives. However, they were individuals, who, except perhaps for the 4 ‘official historians’, seem to have operated solitarily. Van Hoëvell, one of the 4 official government historians, can be regarded as a critical researcher with a clear view of history, but, probably because of this, he was unable to finish his narrative. The other ‘official historians’ were more or less obedient civil servants who primarily seem to have used the archives in a utilitarian and government-oriented way. They did not try to write independent history, but provided the government with the requested historical information. Of all researchers discussed in this article, Rouffaer was the one who came closest to the ‘ideal historian’ in the tradition of Ranke, Seignobos and Langlois. But even he did not accomplish the narrative he wanted to write.

The overall picture of the 19^th-century historians in the East Indies who wanted to use archives – indigenous or colonial – is of the great efforts they had to expend on finding relevant sources. Many of them never reached the stage of writing history but became stranded in tracing and collecting the raw materials needed for history-writing. Tracing and collecting (archival) sources thus became an end in itself. The establishment of the Landsarchief in Batavia in 1892 marked an important step towards a better understanding of the colonial archives in the Indies. The writing of important narratives based on deep research of the archives in the Indies had to wait until the next century.

Footnotes

Notes

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