The Grand Indo Meeting and the Grand Indo Future

Abstract

Indos are a globally dispersed population who trace their ethnic heritage to the mixed-race Indische Nederlander caste in the Dutch East Indies colony. In the wake of the independence of Indonesia from Dutch colonial rule in the mid-twentieth century, thousands of Indos fled to the Netherlands, where they and their descendants now constitute a sizeable fraction of the Dutch population. Indo cultural gatherings in the Netherlands have evolved greatly in the seventy years since ‘repatriates’ first began to arrive in Rotterdam. These gatherings and the performances they platform have responded to a host of outside stimuli inclusive of the initial stigmatization of Indo ethnicity, the subsequent rapid assimilation of Indo people into normatively white Dutch life, the political demands of other post-Indies populations, and the desires of Indo individuals to perform their identities in community with one another (and make a guilder or two in the process.) I describe my experiences at an Indo gathering in Utrecht in 2022, just as Indo festivals were once again permitted after the loosening of restrictions on gatherings imposed by the Dutch government to control the COVID-19 pandemic. This proved a potent site to examine how Indos meet each other in the twenty-first century. I question whether the methods of community formation which served Indos in the past – specifically, gathering over Indonesian cuisine, playing Indo rock music, and Indo line dancing – will meet the needs of the future marked by contagion, intensified migration, and climate catastrophe. Finally, I question my own positionality vis-à-vis this gathering: as US Indo, how do I meet this community, whose experiences are so different from my own? And how can we meet the future of our dispersed culture together?