tugas sejarah

ndonesia: 'The Nyai Nation'
Julia Suryakusuma, CONTRIBUTOR, JAKARTA | Sun, 08/08/2010 1:07 PM | Bookmark
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"History is written by the victors," Winston Churchill once said. I'm sure he wasn't thinking of the war of the sexes, but in our patriarchal world the past is usually written as HIS-story, with women given marginal roles.

Things are changing, as Reggie Baay's book Nyai dan Pergundikan di Hindia Belanda (Nyai and Concubinage in the Dutch East Indies) shows. Women are smack-bang at the center of Baay's work, making him one of a growing number of scholars who have used gender in the past three decades as a primary category in contemporary colonial studies.

Interestingly, Baay, a Dutch author, did so not because he was a historian, but for personal reasons: He discovered he was descended from a nyai.

The meaning of the word nyai is contextual. Originally it was just an appellation for a woman, married or unmarried, and it can still be used that way. In Islamic boarding schools, nyai means "female religious teachers", the counterpart to the kiai (male religious teacher or intellectual). In the context of the Dutch East Indies, however, nyai referred to the concubine-cum-servants/slaves of male Dutch colonialists.

Until the late colonial period, Dutch men usually came to the Indies without wives. So what to do with their basic human needs? I am referring not just to obvious sexual needs (which could be served by a prostitute), but also to a need for the huisvrouwon who married men relied in the Netherlands.

The solution was nyai concubinage, and it became part and parcel of the colonial system. In the industrial West, capitalism would have collapsed without the "housewifization" of women to do unpaid reproductive work: Cooking, cleaning, tending to the needs of their worker husbands and bringing up the next generation of the capitalist workforce.

Similarly, Dutch colonialism in the East Indies would have been impossible without the nyai concubinage system that existed in the VOC, the military barracks and the plantations that the Dutch set up for the purposes of their exploitative colonial enterprise, as this book describes in detail.

Colonialism involved the patriarchal capitalist's search for new pastures to provide the raw material and the labor the West lacked. The fecundity of the East Indies was an obvious draw and its abundance of natural resources made it a joy to plunder. Native women were part of that, and there was no shortage of takers among a mass of poverty-stricken natives.

Serving and servicing despised colonizers was sometimes the only way to survive - and it provided economic benefits, even upward social mobility. Nyais came to play an important role as a mediator between Dutch masters, dislocated from their homeland, their families and culture, and pribumi (native) culture, family and village.

Baay describes the unequal nature of this relationship, and how class was superimposed on an elaborate hierarchy of race and gender. Nyais were described in derogatory terms. They were racially inferior (like all the natives), lazy, animal-like, lustful.

At the same time, however, they were seen as loyal, calm, serving companions, willing to suffer: uncomplaining, passive victims. This ambivalence was reflected in the laws and policies of the colonial government. Nyais were a necessary evil, and considerations of profit outweighed "moral" ones (not that colonialism was moral in the first place).

Baay's book provides an engaging account of the complex world of colonial society, its merging and clashing of cultures (with nyais often trapped in the middle), the use and abuse of women, the demographic history of the Dutch in the East Indies, the evolution of the Eurasian community, how the Dutch adapted to life in the colonies, and the fate of their mixed-blood offspring.

Sometimes Eurasian children were recognized, and even sent to the Netherlands for education. In the (rare) cases when a Dutchman married his nyai, she might also be taken "home" as well. The rest remained in the East Indies. Some were provided for, but most were left behind to a very uncertain fate, as Baay shows.

Academic historians will be disappointed that Baay resorted to novels about nyais and life in the colonies, rather than historical documents. The simple reason is, of course, that there are not that many documents available: HIS-story, remember? Profiles of the nyais at the end of the book make up for it, however. This is fascinating reading, bringing to life stories of pain, suffering, discoveries, wins and losses and, sometimes, love.

And the nyai syndrome still survives.

In New Order Indonesia, the government created nyai-like institutions: Dharma Wanita (the civil servants wives association) and the PKK (Family Welfare Movement), which idealized dependency and obedience, and saw women as appendages to their husbands.

Likewise, the state has relied greatly on revenue generated by women domestic migrant workers (TKW) since the early 1990s, offering them little legal protection.

Trafficking, even of children, is also on the rise. As in colonial times, poor women are still dispensable commodities, available for exploitation.

In fact, the nyai can be seen in a wider sense as a metaphor for the "feminine" Indonesian people, subjugated by "masculine" colonizing rulers. On this analysis, we were in fact colonized by our own governments after "independence" in 1945.

The essentially colonial mentality of subservience perpetuated by the New Order continues today.

Of course hardliner Muslims argue that the way to resist such economic, political and cultural imperialism is to adopt "traditional" Islamic ways and garb. The result of that would, however, be just another form of colonization - this time by Arab cultures - with, once again, little benefit for Indonesian women.

So Meneer Baay, I've got news for you. You're not the only one descended from nyais. The whole of Indonesia is still a nyai nation!

Nyai dan Pergundikan di Hindia Belanda (Nyai and Concubinage in The Dutch East Indies, translated from the Dutch "De njai : het concubinaat in Nederlands-Indi*)

Author: Reggie Baay

Publisher: Komunitas Bambu (June 6, 2010), Jakarta

Pages: 320