National and International Dimensions of Indonesian History

Abstract

Among the more noteworthy features of the Indonesian government's current efforts to recover and accentuate what is believed to be the nation's “cultural identity” is the encouragement being given to the shift in emphasis in the writing of Indonesian history so as to bring out more fully the uniqueness and greatness of the Indonesian cultural achievement. This new “Indonesia-centric” approach is said to provide a much needed correction of the earlier, colonially oriented and “Western centric” type of historical writing about Indonesia, in which the Indonesian “identity” allegedly was obscured because of Western and Dutch ethnocentric prejudices, arid in which historical events in Indonesia were treated as mere appendages to Dutch or European history generally. As early as December, 1957, a seminar of historians in Djokjakarta, Central Java, was convened “in order to eliminate the colonial historian's presentation and restore the proper emphasis on the indigenous culture, tradition and history” in “the history books of the country”. More than five years later the problem still appeared not to have been resolved as yet, for at another historical seminar held in Medan, North Sumatra, in March, 1963, Indonesia's Deputy First Minister for Information, Ruslan Abdulgani, was reportedly still calling “on Indonesian writers to begin to ‘rewrite’ Indonesian history to cleanse it of what he called ‘West-centrism’”. Indonesian historians, Abdulgani urged, “must dare to rewrite our history so that it will no longer be West-centric but Indonesiacentric”.