The Pakempalan Kawulo Ngajogjakarta: An Official Report on the Jogjakarta People's Party of the 1930s

It is not surprising that much of the writing done to date on politics among Indonesians in the early decades of the twentieth cen­ tury has been centered on the development of Indonesian nationalism during those years.1 Nationalism had, after all, emerged from the Japanese occupation with sufficient energy to fuel an already hardpressed Indonesian populace through a four-year struggle for complete independence from the Dutch. Aware of the ultimate victory of that political force in 1950, scholars were naturally alert to its earlier potential when they turned to look at the final years of the Dutch colonial era in the East Indies. As a result, however, writings on the political history of Indonesia in this century reflect a certain unilinear approach: what is considered most significant in the period 1900-40 is whatever was happening then to the ideas, the leaders, and the institutions which were to become important in the years after 1940. Such an approach makes for a comprehensible and fascinating story of struggle, but it also detracts somewhat from the richness of the Indonesian historical experience of those earlier years; for it tends to neglect or to downgrade those elements of Indonesian life not ordinarily thought of as parts of the nationalist movement. Although historians in the past decade have begun to ask important questions about that nationalist movement, about its strength, its appeal, and its vitality in the first thirty-four years after its birth in 1908,1 2