Photographic subjects

Monarchy and visual culture in colonial Indonesia

Susie Protschky

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526124395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Photographic subjects examines photography at royal celebrations during the reign of Queens Wilhelmina (1898–1948) and Juliana (1948–80), a period spanning the zenith and fall of Dutch rule in Indonesia. It is the first monograph in English on the Dutch monarchy and the Netherlands' modern empire in the age of mass and amateur photography. Photographs forged imperial networks, negotiated relations of recognition and subjecthood between Indonesians and Dutch authorities, and informed cultural modes of citizenship at a time of accelerated colonial expansion and major social change in the East Indies/Indonesia. This book advances methods in the uses of photographs for social and cultural history, reveals the entanglement of Dutch and Indonesian histories in the twentieth century, and provides a new interpretation of Queens Wilhelmina and Juliana as imperial monarchs.

Chapter One
Monarchy and empire in the age of mass photography: the Dutch colonial world during Queen Wilhelmina's reign, 1898–1948

Between 31 August and 6 September 1923, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands marked her silver jubilee, the 25th anniversary of her inauguration. The week-long festivities united disparate populations across the globe, not just in the Netherlands but throughout its empire, which included Suriname and the West Indies in the Atlantic realm, and the East Indies in South-east Asia. The milestone also resonated across the Indian Ocean in places that had not been part of the Dutch colonial world for over a century, including Cape Town in southern Africa, an important former port of call for Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East India Company) ships on their way to the East Indies.¹ Throughout Wilhelmina's reign, from 1898 to 1948, the Dutch monarchy could therefore claim links to a global community of subjects that rivalled those of other European empires.

Among the many gifts Wilhelmina received from her subjects in the Netherlands and its colonies on this occasion was a photograph album from the King of Surakarta in the East Indies.² Pakubuwono X's title was susuhunan, Javanese for ‘Axis of the Cosmos’. In reality, his kingdom was little more than a palace and its surrounds in the city of Solo, Central Java, where he was one among several royals, all of whom had been subjugated to Dutch rule at the end of the Java War in 1830. It was for this reason that the King of Surakarta was obliged to celebrate the regnal milestones of a Dutch queen – in his own kraton (palace), no less, and in concert with a commoner, the Resident, a Dutch civil servant with whom the susuhunan ceremonially shared his throne on official occasions.

Looking through the pages of the album, Queen Wilhelmina would have had an opportunity to see this for herself. A photograph of Pakubuwono X, the Dutch official J. J. van Helsdingen and their respective wives all enthroned on the bale buko sri came after a full-length portrait of the susuhunan and a photograph of the pavilion in the kraton where the ritual procession held in Wilhelmina's honour culminated. Following those photographs, the Dutch queen would suddenly have been confronted with an image of herself – or rather, a mounted bust, decorated with leaves and flowers and suffused in the glow of a chandelier's electric light (figure 1.1). An effigy was required for the king and official to look at because Queen Wilhelmina was not a guest of honour at the palace – not in 1923, and not ever, anywhere in the Dutch empire, even in the East Indies, at that time the largest, oldest and most lucrative of the Netherlands’ colonies to remain after centuries of overseas expansion.

1.1 Album of Pakubuwono X, ‘The decorated bust of Her Majesty the Queen in the Pendopo Sasono Sewoko’, Surakarta (Central Java), 1923

The natural light streaming in from between the pillars and emanating from the chandelier, which served both as crown and nimbus, symbolically bestowed regal and divine attributes on Wilhelmina. Despite her being a pious Christian, the queen might have been uncomfortable with the sacral implications of the nimbus, for heads of the House of Orange had never ruled by divine right. The light effect was also meaningful in Javanese visual culture where, as Benedict Anderson has shown, the halo could be interpreted as the tèja (radiance) ‘traditionally associated with the public visage of the ruler’, a physical emanation of their divine radiance (wahyu).³ Anthropologist Karen Strassler has identified the same effect in photographs of revered Indonesians in contemporary Javanese visual culture.⁴ In Pakubuwono X's photograph, the halo belongs not to a male, Muslim Javanese but to a foreign monarch, a Christian and a woman, all of which makes it an unusual image in the history of Javanese photography.

This image eloquently captures how photography, a visual medium with global reach in the early twentieth century, drew upon Javanese visual practices in dialogue with European conventions. In this photograph we also encounter the major theme of this book: how the relations of a European, female king with her subjects were mediated through photography across a transnational realm that included overseas colonies. Pakubuwono X's photograph album is but one of many examples discussed throughout this book of how both elite and ordinary subjects of the Dutch queen in the East Indies, Indonesians as well as Europeans, used photographs to make subtle political communications with Wilhelmina and each other. These encounters included diplomatic exchanges, appeals to a powerful institution for recognition and negotiations of subjecthood. Pakubuwono X's photograph is also one among countless examples of visual associations made in colonial photography between electricity and Queen Wilhelmina's ‘enlightened’ rule. I argue in this book that looking at a Dutch monarch through the lenses of cameras in the East Indies sheds new light on Indonesian histories, Dutch histories and their entanglement with each other.

Monarchy and empire

Why this queen, Wilhelmina, in particular? Her reign spanned the zenith and fall of Dutch rule in Indonesia. Her half-century as queen, from 1898 to 1948, remains the longest reign of any Dutch monarch to date. Her mother, Queen Emma, was regent in the 1890s, but it was Wilhelmina who became the first sovereign female king to lead the House of Orange. The origins of this dynasty stretched to William the Silent (1533–84), the first Prince of Orange, and coincided with the advent of Dutch overseas expansion under the aegis of the East and West India Companies. Wilhelmina had fewer constitutional powers in her colonies or at home than her nineteenth-century forebears, Kings Willem I, II and III,⁵ yet she became the last monarch to preside over the modern Dutch empire in its most complete form, when it comprised Suriname in South America, the six Caribbean islands of the Netherlands West Indies (Sint Maarten, Sint Eustatius, Saba, Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao) and the archipelago then known as the East Indies, now Indonesia. It was during Wilhelmina's reign that Dutch sovereignty in this archipelago expanded to the borders that her heir, Juliana, inherited in 1948, and then ceded to the Republic of Indonesia the following year.

Queen Wilhelmina was the figure who loomed large, if symbolically, in the colonial politics of her time. She was monarch when the first parties in favour of East Indies self-rule were founded: Budi Utomo in 1908, the Indische Partij and Sarekat Islam in 1912, and the Nationalist Party in 1927. She was queen when the first communist uprisings erupted in Java and Sumatra in 1926, only to be repressed by the colonial government. She was still on the throne, but exiled in London, when Japanese forces invaded the archipelago in 1942. She was back at the helm when they capitulated in 1945 and Soekarno and Hatta declared Indonesian independence. When the Indonesian National Revolution proceeded to defend this proclamation, Wilhelmina was revered by the Dutch and colonial forces who fought to retain the ‘Indies’.

She was a recurring motif in the polemics of renowned Indonesians who lived in the twentieth century. Her regnal milestones marked time in the memoir of an Indonesian elected to the Council of the Indies (Volksraad), Achmad Djajadiningrat (1877–1943), who served on this advisory body to the governor-general in the early 1930s.⁶ She was affected by the writings of Sutan Sjahrir (1909–66), Indonesia's first prime minister in the revolutionary government, who had been forced to celebrate her birthday when he was imprisoned on Banda in the mid-1930s.⁷ She was encountered and fetishised – in the form of a mass-produced portrait, no less – by Minke, the fictional protagonist of Indonesia's most famous novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer.⁸ And yet she is rarely remembered, except anecdotally, in histories of Indonesia.

Soon after Wilhelmina was inaugurated as queen in 1898, koninginnedag (Queen's Day) emerged in the East Indies as an important annual event for celebrating the colony as a Dutch possession and uniting it with other parts of the Dutch colonial world.⁹ The rites of passage of leading members of the House of Orange had been celebrated sporadically here since the East India Company had become the primary agent of Dutch power in Asia.¹⁰ However, Wilhelmina was the first monarch whose public birthday and inauguration celebrations became a regular fixture, aimed at unifying Dutch subjects under a common figurehead.¹¹ These practices commenced in the 1880s, in Wilhelmina's youth, as the fortunes of the House of Orange appeared to be in decline, and in the context of widening political and religious rifts in Dutch society.

Wilhelmina was born into a late nineteenth-century Netherlands where mass political participation manifested as ‘pillarisation’ (verzuiling), with different political and confessional groups nurturing their own institutions to cultivate strong communal identities. From the 1870s liberals and conservatives were united in anxiety over the apparent lack of will towards national unity in the Netherlands.¹² For many, the monarchy seemed a politically neutral solution. Princesjedag (Princess's Day) was the initiative of municipal elites who cast the young Wilhelmina as a remedy for the tensions of the day, a common focus of loyalty for Du...