Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony

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Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers.\ Chapter 1\ LANGUAGE AS ASPHALT\ The need of a constantly expanding market for its products\ chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.\ It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish\ connections everywhere.\ —Marx-Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party1\ \ Bare Feet\ IT MAY help, just for a moment, to think, with Bergson, about a landscape in the beginning, as if it were "the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled."2\ On February 13, 1891, an expedition embarked on a route out of Padang Pandjang, a small town in West Sumatra, a point at the edge, a station in the late-colonial Netherlands East Indies beyond which trains could not go. The aim of the expedition was to survey the area yonder for a new railway to Siak, across the island, to its east coast. At the head of the Siak expedition was Dr. Jan Willem IJzerman, the main engineer of the Dutch state railways. He was forty at the time and a renaissance man of sorts. Besides being, possibly, the most influential technician behindbuilding the new Indies railways, he was a well-known amateur archeologist and a member of the archeological society in the princely town of Yogyakarta.3 Toward the end of his life, in 1924, IJzerman, too, had been recognized as the initiator of the first and only technical college in the late-colonial Indies. His bronze bust had been placed in IJzerman Park, near the school campus in Bandung.4\ On February 13, 1891, at six o'clock in the morning, the IJzerman Siak expedition started up "with a little word madjoe," which meant "forward" in Malay, the lingua franca of the colony. The plan was to walk "from six till four," every day, from sunrise to two hours before sunset.5 In addition to IJzerman and three other Dutchmen, there were about a dozen Javanese servants, twenty Javanese railway workers, and about 120 helpers recruited locally from among the Sumatrans. The expedition carried "trunks, field beds, chairs, imitation-leather sheets for shelters, mats, ammunition, wire, ropes, nails, paraffin, wicks, a photographic camera, and food."6\ Dr. IJzerman, as they were on the way, never parted with his pocket revolver. He was as happy, or so it seems, as a man in his forties might be: "Here," he wrote, "the saying of Mr. Potter from his famous American novel rings true: 'What is a man without a revolver in Texas?'"7 The men of the IJzerman expedition killed fish for dinner with dynamite cartridges.8 Their camp in the jungle was attacked by "bandits."9 The sense of the Wild West was heightened by an image of a pioneer's grave. This was, actually, how IJzerman opened his story in the expedition memorial book: "Since the discovery of the Oembilin coal fields by the genius of a mining engineer, W. H. de Greve, in 1868, people started to speak and to write about a desirability to reach the big rivers that flowed as far as into the Straits of Malacca."10 A large photograph of the engineer Greve's grave in the jungle, "merely a little pile of earth in the shade of a big tjoebadak tree," took up the entire title page of the memorial book.11\ IJzerman's men, as they walked, came repeatedly upon fresh sporen, "tracks" or "footprints," of "elephants, rhinoceros, tapirs, tigers, boars, deer." The footprints were "sharply engraved in the damp clay."12 Most of the time, it was just footprints the men saw; rarely did they spot an animal itself.13 It was, largely, just sensing, prints of animal feet on the thoroughly calm and unruffled surface of earth. Yet in Dutch—the language of the expedition—sporen meant both the footprints of the jungle animals the men sensed and the railway tracks they came to build.\ In their own account, the Dutchmen in the expedition appeared exposed and their senses seemed bared. The untamed nature through which they passed, too, appeared as if opening itself up, and—if a man could take it—in a sense, friendly:\ In the forest, far from inhabited world, deep silence reigned most of the time. There were no monkey colonies to raise echoes with their merry shouting, no flock of songbirds to start their crystal melodies, all the large animals as if were extinct. . . No mosquito disturbed our rest at night, we did not even have to unpack our mosquito nets. No poisonous snake, no centipede, and no scorpion made our sleeping in the open, under the trees, on the mounds of molding leaves dangerous, no rat gnawed at our rice reserves, cans with our food could be left around opened. . . The plants were even more innocent, no leaf inflamed our skin, no thorn infected our blood. . . We could even drink forest water safely.14\ As the men moved, so the memorial book of the expedition describes it, they felt the landscape as kindred and moving with them. The memorial book conveys a sense of fluency between the people and nature. The expedition worked a river, for instance, and the river, thunderously and grandly, streamed past the people as they worked:\ Gigantic tree trunks raced with great speed and broke on the rocks that filled the riverbed, in pieces, crushed in pieces the lumber moved on its way to the sea, or, ebbed off the stream, gathered on the shallow sands . . . there was a majestic calmness further ahead; noiseless, dark-green woods gently blanketed the river banks.15\ The men's language was lush with words, as their days were lush with actions and movements, and their senses lush with sounds, shapes, and scents. Or, to put it less innocently, this was a Baroque-like sameness of man and man's surroundings, in which dreams and man's labor as well as conquest might be supposed to come together. One of the Dutchmen on the expedition, Van Bemmelen, captured another moment in this particular sensing of colonial modernity. As they struggled along one of the untamed rivers, "In my elation, I shouted to [IJzerman] and urged him to admire a newly appearing splendor on the right bank. 'I look only to the left side,' he shouted back, 'this is where the railway must go.'"16\ They worked the river and the jungle so hard, moved with so much exertion, sensed everything so intensely, that there seemed to be little time and motivation left for landscape mapping, animal stuffing, or, for instance, butterfly pinning:\ Initially, it was our intention to check the longitude and latitude of all important spots with the help of chronometer and by astronomical observation, for the remaining assessment patent boussole Smalcalder was to be used. But, very soon, it became clear that, given the limited time at our disposal and given our limited forces, we would have to be satisfied with just fleeting measurements made with a simple compass and a tape.\ Besides, "The number of containers with alcohol for collecting natural samples, and the quantity of paper for drying and pressing the plant samples, had to be reduced; all other considerations had to be put aside in face of the necessity to carry an amount of rice large enough to feed 300 men for at least 14 days."17\ All the work was done so that the (railway) wheels, in the future, might turn. Yet, for the expedition to move—and to move the landscape as they moved—meant leaving footprints in the damp clay, like a rhinoceros or a boar. To move on, a particular technology of movement was required: "clambering over fallen trees, balancing on their trunks, skidding down, and stumbling through the muddy holes in between."18\ The exertion, the working the landscape and the walking, it seems, was powerful enough to create a credible illusion. It even appeared natural, after such a day of prospecting, when a photograph was taken, that it would take time and effort to distinguish IJzerman and the other Dutchmen from the Javanese and Sumatran, as the memorial book formulated it, reisgenooten, "traveling companions," and metgezellen, "companions."19 A greater part of the illustrations in the memorial book of the expedition, as usual at the time, were either watercolors or drawings made from photographs. In An Evening Deliberation, for instance, a group of men is seen, huddled together. Even the artist who made the drawing did not apparently think it particularly important to retouch the photograph. It is not easy, at all, to tell who is IJzerman, where the other Dutchmen are, and which ones are the Asians.20\ Softly, even, they seemed to work together. As the work was accomplished, on the first morning after the expedition reached Siak, the final station of the future railway (before they set on their way back onboard a Chinese steamer), Van Bemmelen, as he wrote in the memorial book, woke up, and his thoughts went back over the past weeks. He thought of the days as "days of freedom, camp life without borders," and "adventure." However, it is clear that the Dutchman most eagerly wanted to tell it as a tale of walking. What would stay in his memory most powerfully, he wrote, was "dampness in my half-torn laarzen boots, and the gaiters that almost turned brown by the exposure to campfires and mud."21\ Hard and Clean Roads\ In 1840, a new and eager Dutch minister of colonies, Jean Chrétien Baud, ordered forty camels to be shipped to the Dutch Indies. As an afterthought, two hundred donkeys were also to go. A year later, people in the colony were not allowed to slaughter buffaloes, which might be used for work in ports and on roads.22 This kind of eagerness lasted. As late as 1862, a deputy in the Dutch parliament suggested that a number of llamas and elephants should be sent to the Indies to work as draught animals, especially on the "sugar road" between Semarang and Salatiga in Central Java.23 However, this deputy already appeared to be behind the times.\ Since the early nineteenth century, the Great Daendels Mail Road had been in use in the Indies, cutting through the main island of Java from west to east. It was built, between 1808 and 1811, as a part of the defense against an expected British invasion, and it was "a gigantic road-building project that, with justification, was called 'Napoleonic.'"24 The Daendels road was a pre-twentieth-century wonder of speed (18 to 20 kilometers per hour in the best places),25 and, equally so, of order. As native children learned in 1886 from their primary school textbooks, "Along the road, each 16 1/3 minutes, there is one stake [paal] to indicate a distance. At each fifth stake, there is a post [bangsal] for the government mail to change horses."26\ For most of the Indies, even most of Java, at the time, the road of course was not very relevant. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, it took as long as three, even five, months for a load of coffee from the interior of Java off the Daendels road to reach the sea port of Semarang.27 As the traffic got heavier, the highway itself, even for the areas that had access to it, became insufficient for anyone wishing to travel modern: "a European coach, usually overloaded with passengers and their belongings is, frequently too heavy to manage for the little Javanese horses."28\ In 1842, a year after the Dutch colonial minister Baud suggested the camels, the first ever magazine published in the Dutch Indies, Kopiïst, "Copyist," launched a series on inventions, and, as invention no. 11, presented "steamways and steam carriages":\ If we are not mistaken, Asia, until today, does not have a single railway. The invention, in the East, did not extend beyond the northern shores of Egypt . . . It is a widely known fact that the population of Java, as far as its numbers and potential are concerned, is not evenly distributed. In a country like this, introduction of even a single steam machine, certainly, would free a vast number of hands so urgently needed by our agriculture in other locations. The steam means of transport, generally, has a power to release the population from the unproductive drudgery in which it is bound today.29\ According to the Kopiïst, Asia, and namely, the Dutch Indies, was at least as fit for the wonderful new invention as Europe. The terrain of the Indies, the Kopiïst wrote, did not pose any serious obstacle; it laid, waiting for the trains:\ From Soerabaia, to the north of the river Kedirie, towards dessa [Malay for village] Menoeng . . . the turf is flat. . . From Tjirebon to the river of Madioen, there are no great hurdles. . . Over the river of Madioen, a wooden bridge could easily be built . . . the rugged ground there could easily be leveled and the ravines filled.30\ Reading the Kopiïst, one just could feel how agreeable it would be to build the tracks through Java, from the port city of Surabaya in the east, hundreds of miles to the west, to Batavia, the metropolis of the colony. As the Kopiïst saw it, there appeared nothing prohibitive in the costs of the project either:\ the population can do the earth-moving and stone-crushing work for the railway free of charge or, at worst, it can be paid in rice and salt, as this can be made a part of a usual corvée service for the government . . . it is evident that the costs will be even more affordable than those in either Europe or America.31\ To build the main track, the Kopiïst calculated, would cost merely 8,704,080 guilders, and the side tracks 3,215,520 guilders, for a total 11,919,600 guilders, 2,000,000 guilders would pay for vehicles and warehouses, 1,000,000 guilders would take care of interest. The grand total might be "21,000,000 guilders only."32\ In 1842, the same year the Kopiïst article was published, in the same vein of engineering optimism, the king of the Netherlands, Willem I, issued the first railway decree for the Indies: "In order to promote the transport of products and other goods from Semarang to Kedoe, the Princely Lands in Java, and vice versa, an iron railway will be laid."33\ It took twenty-five years, in fact, after the first Indies royal railway decree to build the first 25 kilometers of the iron rails in the colony, and it took another decade to build the next 300 kilometers—all of them on Java.34 By heavy and slow steps, rather than daintily as the Kopiïst suggested, the Indies trains came into existence. By 1882, in the words of a special commission of the learned Indisch Genootschap, "Indies Society," railways and "the little railways," the tramways, also in the Dutch colony, proved themselves to be "the most useful of the present discoveries, the most admirable victory of man over time and distance, the most powerful incentive to labor, exchange in values, and civilization."35\ By 1888, eight main railway lines were in operation, all in Java, and the fifteen largest cities of the island had a railway connection.36 In April 1899, an electric tram was installed in Batavia,37 and, in 1909, the tramway lines in the city were already 14 kilometers long. That whole year only one fatal accident was reported on the Batavia tramway lines.38\  \ \ Raden Ajeng Kartini—a teenager when Dr. IJzerman went on his expedition, twenty years old when the electric tram started in Batavia—was the daughter of a high-ranking Javanese official in the colonial government, a boepati, "regent," of Japara. Japara, where Kartini spent most of her life, was a small place on the north coast of Java. Kartini's friends, mentors, and protectors, almost all Dutch, in the hype of their time, called her a Javanese princess. In post-colonial Indonesia, and until today, almost a century after her death, she has been called the mother of Indonesian nationalism.\ "If I were a boy," Kartini wrote in 1900, from Japara to a Dutch friend, "I should not think twice, but would become a sailor at once."39 Kartini thought of ships often: "We do not want any more to sail on a sinking ship," she also wrote, meaning Javanese society;40 "courage of the hand at the rudder, and pumping at the leak, could have saved us from destruction."41\ Japara, where Kartini lived, was very much off all the new and newly emerging modern Indies roads. From Japara, one had to travel on horse or in a horse-driven cart, on a dirt, and often muddy, road to Majong. There, one might board a steam tram to Djoewana or Semarang. Only there was there a "real train."42 Kartini often warned potential visitors of "the tiring trip."43 Yet, whenever an opportunity arose, or in her dreams, she quickly got onboard: "we were on the track with the first morning tram . . . long before the tram station of Pemalang appeared, as we steamed on, we were looking out for our darling."44\ When guests were to come to Japara, Kartini traveled with her aristocratic father to meet them at the station: "how afraid we were that we miss the tram."45 She was allowed to travel very little, as she was an unmarried Muslim woman. Yet, the moments on the train, carefully counted, were the most intense for her, and, so it sometimes seemed, the only real moments of life.46 Kartini met people, was touched, received news, and heard rumors on the train or at a railway station: "In the train . . . I pressed my hand on my heart . . . I heard much in the tram."47 The dreams were most frequent and drew the clearest image: "Now, we fly with a storm over the iron road":48 "Would I ever be able to forget that divine ride with her to the station? . . . Do not fly so fast on the smooth iron tracks, you sniffling, steaming monster, do not let this beautiful meeting end so quickly. . . I prayed that the ride would never end. . . But, alas! the stoker did not hear me."49\ It was beyond any doubt to the excited Kartini that the modern roads in the Indies had to be made all anew, and hard. The newness, the hardness and cleanness—it was the roads' modernity. Cleanness of the roads, in this logic, was purity of times, democracy even, we might say. There were some people in the Indies, Kartini wrote, who demanded that they be addressed by aristocratic titles; often, these titles did not even belong to them. On the whole, Kartini wrote, "it is a matter of indifference": "but when overseers, railroad engineers (and perhaps tomorrow station masters too), allow themselves to be thus addressed by their servants, it is absurdly funny."50\ New roads through Java and in the whole colony, to Kartini, were to be fully made of progress, and, as long as they were made of that hard and clean stuff, nothing could stop the wheels. A Javanese girl was run over by a tram not far from Japara, and Kartini reported the accident in a letter. This event proved, Kartini wrote, how a modern system of "the first medical aid" became very important.51 Kartini died a year after she was married, at the age of twenty-five, a few days after she gave birth to her first child. She may be written about, perhaps, the way a Viennese author, Robert Musil, at about the same time, wrote about one of his Austrian contemporaries: "She was one of those charmingly purposeful young women of our time who would instantly become bus drivers if some higher purpose called for it."52\ There were no buses in Japara, and in the entire Netherlands Indies colony, in 1900, however. And also, Kartini, in her liking for newness, cleanness, and hardness, would dream of planes instead of buses. This was, at least, what she wrote, three years before her death, in 1901, to one of her and her father's friends, physician Dr. Anton, in Jena, Germany: "flying machine will have come into use, and on some golden day you will see one of them flutter over Jena's blue horizon bringing a guest from afar. I should indeed have been born a boy."53\ Struggle for the Roads\ Modern roads in the Indies, besides the many wonderful things they did, became from the moment of their inception a battlefield and a space where the Dutch in the colony were clearly uncertain of themselves.\ Professor Stokvis, a Dutch liberal and respected colonial expert, in a lecture in 1894, "Man in Tropics in Connection with Colonization," declared that "not a single example is known to me of a European family that has been able to reproduce itself in this tropical land for as much as three generations without regularly traveling to Europe, or without being blood-mixed with one of the local races."54 This vulnerability to mixing, another respectful Dutch expert wrote at the time, should serve as a warning against "too rosy" an expectation about the future of the Dutch in the Indies.55\ Many of the honored voices in the colony warned that the Dutch might sink in the Indies. An eminent Dutch engineer and best-selling author, van Sandick, wrote in 1891:\ against every one who might accomplish it, there stand hundreds who will get stuck in the Indies, without a chance to see Europe again. Holland will be reached again only by those who are truly loved by fate; the aggregation of those who, year after year, depart to the tropics will also die there, forgotten by their motherland.56\ According to official statistics widely publicized at the time, 80 percent of the Dutch population of the colony, by the early twentieth century, had been born in the tropics. An unspecified but large majority of them, according to the same source, had in their veins, indeed, "a drop of native blood or more."57 In 1900, according to another very seriously heeded estimate, among all the legally Dutch children born in the Indies (i.e., including those with "a drop of native blood or more"), as many as 40 percent could not speak Dutch at all, and 30 percent of them spoke their "native language" with difficulty.58\ In 1900, about 60,000 Europeans, mostly Dutch, lived in the Indies.59 In 1930—when the last ever census was taken in the colony—the number had grown to 208,000. Still, it was merely 0.34 percent of the 60 million total population.60 As one Dutch journalist, Willem Walraven, put it in the 1930s the Dutch lived in and moved over the Indies "like flies upon milk."61\ Through this landscape of milk the modern roads of the Indies were to push. In 1880, in the most prestigious and scholarly journal of the colony, Indische Gids, "Indies Guide," J.F.F. Moet, again, as many before him, argued in favor of trains in the Indies. He emphasized one point in particular. He wrote about how wonderful his experience was in Europe—Kassel, Germany, for instance, or on the steam tramway between the Hague and Scheveningen, in the Netherlands:\ In spite of the fact that the train passes through the busiest roads and streets, it does not cause any difficulty. Horses are not frightened, even in the evenings, as the locomotives move amidst the houses of the towns with their large red lights in front and large white lights on the sides. I saw a machine with two carriages, at [the main square of Kassel], in fact, on the market day; it puffed through the very middle of the crowd, and the women kept sitting behind their stalls and selling their fruits and vegetables as if nothing at all was happening.62\ This was, and increasingly so, the late-colonial plan and dream. Horses and crowds would not be frightened in the Indies. It would be, in this aspect, quite like Europe. The time schedule, and the list of stops, depots, and terminals of the new electric tramway in Batavia, in 1910, for instance, read exactly in that programmed and dreamy way. New modern roads would be kept clean and hard, running upon the landscape of milk, calm and orderly, between one and the next point of an undoubted modernity:\ Telephone Office, Photographic Association, Batavia Sporting Club, Military Engineers Workshops, Railway Station Weltevreden, Protestant Church, High School, Racetrack, English Sporting Club, Telephone Office, Officers Barracks, Concordia Club, Waterloo-Square Concert Terrain and Soccer Fields (also for natives) . . .63\ As late as the mid-1920s, even the rails for the Indies railways were imported from Europe.64 As late as in the early 1940s, to the very end of the Dutch colonial era, virtually all technical equipment came from the West. Only a few body parts of carriages, and the sleepers, were made of teak and other Asian wood.65\ Many, and in some parts most, of the skilled railway and road-building workers were Indies Chinese, or natives imported from other islands or other parts of Java.66 In 1918, the Indies state railways employed 179 Dutch officials born in Europe and 564 Dutch officials born in the Indies.67 Not a single clerk, station master, or machinist was a non-European. In 1917, a few dozen natives, in the colony of 60 million, had been admitted to a new state-railways training course for the bottom-level clerical positions.68 The milk should not be stirred. The idea was to install a tradition of just another vocation, inherited, gradually and orderly, from father to son, exactly as in Europe, without frightening the crowds.\ Trains in the Indies, however, as everywhere in the world, possessed an amazing power of attraction. Horses, perhaps, might be made not to panic. But, as soon as rails were laid and the first train appeared, people, the whole landscape, turned around and moved to the train.\ In 1883, a Dutch official publication about the contemporary colonial Indies noted: "Particularly the native population makes a great use of the existing railways."69 This became an inevitable appendix of the road optimism. Most often, it was just an awkwardly placed emphasis.\ In 1904, a special government investigating committee reported that the number of passengers in the first ("European") class of the Indies trains rose by 4,000 during the previous 3 years; in the second (lower-income "European" and top-level "native") class the number of passengers rose by 33,000. Not very much, in fact. In the third ("native") class, however (or kambing, "goat" class, as it was commonly called), the increase was 550,000!70 The committee did not hide its surprise: "The use of trains and trams by kleine man [Dutch for "little man," man in the street, native] is rising faster than initially expected."71 The same committee hired a group of "four deft native conductors" and sent it to the trains on various lines to engage the passengers in "little kind talks." The data thus collected were also unexpected. The little" men, women, and children, as a railway touched upon their habitat, did not appear to panic, but neither were they in any perceptible awe over the modern technology. In fact, they did not appear to change their traditional ways very much. They just appeared to add a little to the tradition. Pragmatically, en masse, and with an efficient use of the trains, logically, they appeared on the move:\ A. Reasons to travel of economic nature; market, search for work:   69.5%\ B. Reasons to travel of personal nature:   30.5% . . .\      f. visits to other family members   20.8%\      g. law and order; summons to government office or court of justice   3.6%\      h. faith and tradition; visits to graves and other holy places   3.0%\      i. pleasure travel   3.1%72\ \ The natives, as the four conductors found out, were choosing the trains, best of all, that allowed them to carry free baggage of 50 kilograms or more.73 The little people of the Indies traveled as they always did, with their goats and their hens sometimes, and with bags of clothes and food. The Madurese (of the island off the northern coast of Java), the report noted, had always been known as echte zwervers, "real wanderers or drifters." By now, however, as the report put it, "all natives appear eager to use trains and trams for their own goals."74 The commission discovered, also, that the natives of lower standing, the "simple men," the real masses, traveled more eagerly and often than their higher-ups, native aristocrats, native colonial officials, the Dutch-supported elite, who, in the ideal plan of the empire, should have been transmitting the modern manners in an orderly way to the plebeians of the colony: "the native notables [were found] much more hokvaster [home-loving, literally: fond of one's fireside] than the little man. . . The little man . . . changes his places of sojourn much more frequently than one usually thinks."75 Santri, the Indies Muslim scholars and students—for a long time suspected by the colonial government as a subversive element of the native society, potential leaders of unrest—were, indeed, found by the conductors' report to be one segment of the Indies native population that used trains and trams radically more than the rest.\ This was an alarming vision of a breaking down of the ideal plan of empire through an invasion of physicality, crowding, and, most gravely, touching. In Batavia, in 1909, on the electric tram lines, in a single month, 10,404 passengers traveled in first class, 72,623 in second class, and 255,197 in third class.76 True, there had been, most of the time, a special carriage in every train for each class. But the rhythm of the train, the shaking, and the machine were the same. All the passengers were (traveling) humans, and their uncomfortable sameness could nowhere be seen, felt, and smelled as strongly as in the train.\ About the time of the glorious invention of the electric tram in Batavia, Louis Couperus, a famous Dutch writer, published a novel about the Indies, De Stille Kracht, "The Hidden Force." It became one of the most widely read books in the colony. Couperus wrote about an undercurrent that he, sooner than most of the others, felt in the colony, gathering against the Dutch colonial presence. As the Couperus story comes to its end, the Dutch woman protagonist of the novel wanders through modern Batavia, and she watches, in particular, the first European class of the new electric tram:\ in the mornings—when she did her errands in the shops on Rijswijk and Molenvliet, which, with a few French names, tried to give the impression of a southern shopping center of European luxury—did Eva see the exodus to the Old Town of the white men. . . The exodus filled the trams with the white burden of mortality. Many, already well off, but not yet rich enough for their purposes, drove in their mylords and buggies to the Harmonie Club, where they took the tram to spare their horses.77\ It took a whole third of a century from the opening of the first railway line in the Indies for the colonial government, in 1908, to decree a single time for its railway, post, and telegraph service throughout the island of Java.78 Even after this, and until the 1920s, in fact, "Java time remained inconvenient . . . local time was maintained for all other purposes, though there was some tendency for this so-called midden Javatijd [Central Java Time] to be used more widely. Local times continued to be calculated for places outside Java and Madura."79 The modern Indies roads, until the end of the colonial rule, were strips, largely, with a special time. An economic nightmare, certainly, but also a comforting exclusivity against the vision of panicking horses and people.\ Special time, indeed, went hand in hand with special security. As Henri Van Kol, well-known Dutch engineer and socialist expert on colonial issues (also Kartini's mentor at one time), rode on the Atjeh tram in North Sumatra in 1903—passing through the region only a few months before the scene of the fighting between natives and the Dutch, the most bloody colonial Aceh war (1874-1903)—Van Kol was thrilled, excited, and truly a pure-idea model colonial passenger: "Such a short time ago, so many fallen. . . . [And now, there] by tram, from Lho Seumawé to. . . Maneh . . . All through, and safely."80\ Mas Marco Kartodikromo was a contemporary of all of them—IJzerman, Kartini, Van Kol. He was a most extraordinary journalist of the fledgling Indonesian nationalism in the early twentieth century. As far as the Indies modern roads and trains were concerned, he had the acuteness of a guerrilla fighter. Even at a time when there seemed to be a perfect peace in the colony (no uprising, no political unrest), Mas Marco saw the Indies "little man"—boemipoetra, "son of the soil," saudara, his "brother," as he called him81—when about to take a modern road, or board a train, as approaching a thin yet well embanked battle line. One of Mas Marco's several journals was called Doenia Bergerak, "World on the Move." When one happened to be a son of the soil, Doenia Bergerak wrote, in 1914, for instance, one would do well to approach a railway station in a state of alert:\ Disappearance of platform tickets\  \ As every one of our readers knows, platform tickets used to be available at all the big stations, in Koetoardjo, Djocja, Bandoeng etc. . . As we read in the newspapers, however, Malay as well as Javanese ones, at the station of Koetoardjo, for example, platform tickets recently disappeared. Somebody may write to us, hopefully, and explain it. This does not seem to be done in order to please the public, and to make it possible for the people to see off and welcome friends at the train without having to pay an additional charge. . . Now, a Javanese dad, let us say, cannot go inside the station gallery, and has to wait in the open, at a safe distance from the station. . . However!!! when someone happens to belong to the Dutch or Chinese stock, well, please, do enter and sit on the bench inside the station. Hmm!!! . . . The Javanese dad is made into one-fourth of a man.82\ When a son of the soil, a native, penetrated as close to the battle line as the ticket office:\ Tramway tickets in Tjepoe railways station are sold out  \ . . . When we asked for the green (3rd class) tickets to Solo, we were told by the ticket-office man: We hebben niet meer in voorraad (Dutch for "we have no more in stock"). Thus, we were forced to pay for our tickets from Tjepoe to Goendih (2nd class price) 1.80 guilder, and, in Goendih, from Goendih to Solo, again another 0.90 guilder.83\ When a son (or a daughter) of the soil got on board:\ Various News  \ On July 19, 1914, several women boarded a train of the state railways to Kalisoso, where they were going to visit some holy places together. The Dutch conductor on the train (the train leaving Solo at 5.40), in manners not too polite, chose to amuse himself with the women on board. So the story goes . . . the conductor pinched the cheeks of the women, for instance, and, throughout, he expressed himself in words that rather should not be heard in public. As he was doing this, the women became pale, ashamed, and afraid. If this report is true, then, why do these women themselves, their husbands, or others in their families not complain to the railway management? What is there to be afraid of? Don't be scared! We stand ready to help as much as needed! Our cause is just!84\ Some sons of the soil, natives, made it eventually as close to the line as to become themselves native road or railway personnel. Here is a letter full of technology from one of these as printed in the same Mas Marco paper:\ Stationery and Pencil Inventory  \ . . . Beginning with 1913 . . . we were asked to use pencils instead of pens. We do need inktpotlood (indelible pencils) of course, and very strong ones, because we write, as a rule, through one or more sheets of doordrukpapier (carbon paper). Ink pencils came from the inventory of the state railways . . .\      Beginning January 1914, I was transferred to the present place in N. Since then, and until April 1914, I used the pencils I still had from my previous station—three stubs of Koh-I-Noor pencils. Then the pencils were finished, and, in April 1914, I asked the chief of the station in N. for another pencil. He gave me a red ink pencil model "Johanfaber's No. 400." After I finish this, I will not get another one, since there are no more pencils in the inventory; this, at least, the chief told me. . . By September 1914, already, I was using a pencil of the length of merely between 3 to 4 cm. I talked about it to a friend, and he advised me to attach a tendril made of bamboo to the pencil (it was done in the friend's workshop). Thus, at present, I could still use the pencil. On September 1, 1914, I was transferred to the station ticket office, but my pencil is now only 1 cm long . . .\      Many greetings and respect from me, Watjono.85\ It was a thin red line. We do not know what happened when Watjono finished his Johanfaber's pencil. Late in 1918, however, as World War I ended and as reports of an attempted socialist coup in the Netherlands reached the Indies, a radical dissident Dutch journal in the Indies, Beweging, "Movement," published a list of popular demands that, the journal felt, might be raised in case the revolution spread from the Netherlands to its colony. Besides doing away with the Dutch monarchy and other upside-downs, there would be, almost certainly, the journal wrote, a demand raised for "only one class to be installed on the railways, cheaper, and offering more comfort than it is now the case in the 3rd class."86\ Revolution, however, like Godot, never seemed to come to the Indies. In 1921, in spite of a general decline in living standards, ticket prices on the Indies railways were raised. There were, still, the same three railway classes, with the third class as uncomfortable, and as native, as before.\ The city of Semarang was a major railway junction in Central Java. (It was a place, also, close to Japara, where Kartini used to travel on the train most often.) By 1921, Semarang was called "The Red City" of the colony. From Semarang, in 1921, according to a historian, "Communist influences spread in its vicinity and to smaller towns along railroad lines—to Pati, Demak, and Purwodadi to the east; to Salatiga, Boyolali and further to Madiun and Nganjuk to the south; and to Pekalongan, Brebes, Tegal, and Cirebon to the West."87\ These were the (railway) nerves exposed. On May 10, 1923, a railway strike broke out in Semarang, the biggest strike ever in the history of the Dutch colony. The strike spread through Java, as far west as Cirebon, a city and railway station only five hours by train from Batavia, and as far east as Surabaya, the biggest port and naval base and the most important strategic point of the colony next to Batavia. The rails and sleepers were torn off the tracks, and the battle cry of the strike was spoor tabrakan, "tracks crushing"!88 When a Dutch liberal journal, at the end of the era, in 1941, looked back and tried to identify one crucial moment when colonialism failed in its project of modernity, this event, the railway strike of 1923, was picked to be the point.89\ Godot, anyway, did not come again. The smoothness with which the crucial moments were being passed over, in fact, seems to be the main theme of late-colonial history, and, perhaps, of Indonesian history beyond. The colonial project, in a sense, worked. There was a machine-like easiness of the past moving into the present, and the future. The railway strike of 1923 was over in a mere twelve days. The membership of the principal railway workers union behind the strike fell, in a single month after the strike, from 13,000 to less than 1,000.90 The trains were running again, and, indeed, sharp on time.\  \ \ In 1922, a year before the railway strike, Louis Couperus, the author of The Hidden Force, visited the Indies once more, and for the last time in his life. This time, he did not stay only in Java as usual. He traveled widely, through most of Sumatra, Java, and even to Dutch Borneo. The new late-colonial network of railways and roads made it possible by now. Couperus went by ship, train, and car. Some of Couperus' critics say that the refined author did not like the new Indies at all; the only true affection, they say he felt was for the Indies buffaloes. This is not entirely fair. Couperus clearly—and he was setting a new standard for the refined and anxious Dutch rulers, residents, visitors, and engineers as well—felt very much affection, also, toward the native drivers: "Both Javanese chauffeurs—there are two who will relieve each other on the long journey—stare straight ahead; sitting behind them we see four attentive trembling ears. I believe that could we see into their hearts we should find they are more afraid of oranboenian (ghosts) than of tigers."91\ In May 1927, a new factory was opened by General Motors in Tanjung Priok, the harbor of Batavia. Already by early 1928, 5,732 Chevrolets left the plant for the markets in the Netherlands Indies as well as British Singapore, Malaya, and Siam. As one of the papers for native Malay readers excitedly commented: "Now, we all can see how great progress and human endeavor is, and, with each day, how all this comes closer to ourselves."92\ By 1939, there were 51,615 cars in the Indies, 37,500 of them in Java, 7,557 in Batavia, 4,945 in Bandung, and 657, for instance, in the Japara-Rembang region, where Kartini had lived and where she had died.93 Most of the automobiles in the colony, of course, were owned by the Europeans. Unlike on the Indies railways, however, from the early times and increasingly, there were natives behind the wheel.94 In the first three months of 1928, for example, in Surabaya, there were 524 serious traffic accidents, 42 percent of them caused by cars, 23 percent by trains or tramway, 17 percent by motorcycles. Among the drivers involved in the accidents, 11 percent were Europeans, 6 percent Chinese and Arabs. As many as 83 percent were natives.95\ More than trains and tramways, also, the cars and motorcycles on the modern roads of the colony appeared vulnerable and bent on "going native." Initially, as should be the case, it was a matter of inventive engineering. At the historic first and big Amsterdam world and colonial exhibition, in 1883, for instance, a gold medal was awarded to a "Batavian one-horse hand-wagon on two wheels . . . Price 350 guilders . . . inventor—C. Deeleman."96 By the 1920s, this very deeleman, which became delman or dilman in the process, was already fully taken over, and it belonged to the little people of the land. Deeleman became as familiar a name on the Indies modern roads as the names of the traditional horse-driven, ox-driven, or buffalo-driven carts such as tjikar, grobak, or sado. Gradually, and deeleman led the way, many of the tjikar, grobak, or sado began to use rubber tires. Toward the end of the Dutch era, some deeleman became motor-propelled.\ It was engineering at a distance from a revolution. A battle much less visible, let's say, than the great railway strike.\ In 1923, in the year of the strike, a long essay was published in a prestigious and scholarly Dutch Indies journal, Koloniale Studiën, "Colonial Studies," about what its author thought to be one of the most serious consequences of World War I in the colony: a historically new, and very fierce, competition between the automobile and the train. Before the war, the essay explained, the railways in the Indies had virtually a monopoly. The native animal-driven carts could not compete with the trains, in speed, in capacity, or in comfort. World War I, however, in spite of the fact that the fighting took place far from the Indies, caused a general disorder in the colony's economy and communications. In the suddenly emerging looseness, through fissures of the upset order, vrachtautos, "lorries," appeared in the colony. The author of the essay made it clear that what he meant were native lorries, and that he saw them as a menace: "The state of tires on which the lorries ride leaves much to be desired. . . Overloading of the lorries is a rule rather than an exception. . . . Public—very fatalistically inclined native public, naturally—makes quite some use, indeed, of this cheap opportunity for transportation."97\ Two years later, in 1925, in Koloniale Studiën again, yet another many-page treatise was published on the subject. "Initially," this study opened, the role of the automobiles was thought to be in filling in only, where there was no railway available at the moment. "Passenger automobiles," besides, were meant to serve, largely, as a "de luxe means of communication." In Europe, according to the author of this second essay, the development of road traffic after World War I did not appear to cause a fundamental problem. In the Dutch Indies, however,\ as yet, it has been beyond us to build a railway network outstretching enough Therefore, sado, deeleman, ebro, kretek, kossong, andong, and whatever name all these carts might have—as the traffic intensifies, everywhere, and even in the largest cities—take on themselves, more and more, a role of the reigning means of public transportation.98\ The European transporters in the colony, the study admitted, "have little understanding of the psyche of the native traveler." In the field of medium distances—and this was the crucial area—the "native transporters" (actually large numbers of them were the Indies Chinese), the "wild buses and trucks," were able to offer "faster transport, wider selection, with a greater flexibility, and along the routes the native travelers really desire to take." The adjusted animal-driven carts, and, increasingly, "native-owned" lorries and buses filled, crowded, a huge and growing "gap" in the colony's modern landscape. It was futile, and a little desperate, to argue, as the essay in Koloniale Studiën did, that this was not a modern technology, too: "These vehicles, as a rule, are second-hand, and, even, third-hand, and, very often, they are in a state of being barely able to hold together."99 And, besides, they destroyed the asphalt.100\ Language-game\ Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how\ things are. . . Doubt gradually loses its sense. This language-\ game just is like that . . . the sureness of the game.\ — Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty101\ People in America still ask me, when they read my texts and hear my accent, how difficult it is, for me, to write and speak English. I rarely tell them, but it is a fact, that, in Czech, my speaking and writing goes more slowly than in English. It is, perhaps, because Czech for me, more than English, is made of what Wittgenstein called "words with an atmosphere." For me, speaking and writing in Czech, more than in English, is like treading on expressions, each of which has a powerful yet uncertain memory, as walking on pebbles only loosely attached to the whole, in a state of equilibrium, so I still try to believe. My Czech, also, feels to me like a language of wet earth. The walking is soft and slow, each step is as if barefoot and expectant of an invisible root of a word that may halt the progress again.\ My English, when compared to this, moves easily and fast. Its words are like blocks of stone in a pavement: cut and polished words, in my English, become usable tools. In English, in contrast to Czech, I am less expectant and less afraid that a word, like a stone, may come loose and, like a patch of plaster, peel off the language. That language, like the hard and clean surface of road, may crack and even, in a disaster scenario, fall apart.\ Articulated in English, for instance, even my memories of Prague are like chiseled stones of pavement; or like the well-mashed corpses of prehistorical plants and animals that make much of the modern asphalt roads. It is how memory can most easily be stored. Uncouth pebbles are sunk into the once-organic matter. The language as asphalt can be spread out fast, and it can cement even the most incongruous things together. It can be, and it is, used to cover a large territory. My English is a language that is most handy against tardiness, and against the fear of language.\ This is where the theme of this chapter, and my writing about it (done in America and in English), came most intensely together. I felt, and it was my imperative in writing, that there was a common potential and danger in both my English and the late-colonial language(s) of the Indies. Both, in order to simplify matters (being languages of strangeness, either of an exile or of an intervention), are eager to mash memories. Both entice to cruising. Both promise to be good against all stammering, but also against touching. Both are ready to help in building a shiny—and the most perverted—idea, that ruling a colony, as writing its history, may be done like hitting the road, a road that needs only to be smooth, and, in case of trouble, yet a bit smoother.\  \ \ Magneet, "Magnet," first appeared at the end of 1913. It was the official organ of Motor-Wielrijders Bond, "Union of the motorcycle riders," and probably the first journal in the Indies devoted exclusively to life on modern roads. Reading through the first volumes of Magneet, one is impressed with how firmly its language-game was played. First of all, one is aware of smoothness.\ Much of each issue of Magneet was taken up by various announcements and reports on clubtochten, "club trips": "Our aim . . . is first of all making collective club trips by members, with focus, first of all, on slow and careful driving."102Magneet described, for instance, the Wilhelmina Park in the center of Batavia, the heart of the colonial capital, as a scene of the greatest jollity:\ Our first Club-trip  \ Wonderful Sunday morning, December 28 [1913] . . . The whole Weltevreden is still half asleep motorcyclists are standing in groups on the fresh green grass of the Wilhelmina Park. . . Just before half past six, our motors zoom, and off we go from the meeting place. . . What a delightful sight! . . . a medley of little club flags ram&eacuteh [Malay for busy, bustling, lively, festive, noisy], in line . . . Photo-cameras click and clack. . . Forwards! Past Rijswijk the cheerful troops buzz, through the French quarter, via Tanah-Abang past Koningsplein towards Matraman to Meester Past Goenoeng Sari the happy company is drawing, attracting many eyes, then into the old town, and, out of there, still in moderate pace to Versteeg, where cold beer is served. . . The men are riding through the busiest of neighborhoods, yet so considerately—it is proved by this trip that it is not dangerous to take a couple of dozens of motorcycle riders and let them loose on the street.103\ The first trip of the union ended in the hotel De Stam, "The Trunk," in New Godangdia, the newly built modern quarter of the city, with yet another cold beer.104\ Through the zooming of machines and the language describing it, the colony's rural landscape was also pronounced safe. The motorcycle-club members, as Magneet reported, penetrated deeper, from the center into the suburbs, and inland. Joyful, excursion-wise, on bicycles, tricycles, with or without sidecars, in groups or alone, they were—or were described as—cruising. The union rented a "Club Café " Buitenzorg, southwest of Batavia at the foot of the hills, and, in the hills, Restaurant Rikkers with a Clubhotel near Cipanas, south of the capital. Other restaurants and hotels soon staked out the club's most popular routes.105 The language was powerful, and it is still quite comforting to read about it in Magneet:\ Along the Tangerang road  \ The calm and the darkness that rule all around are broken only by the hot-tempered puffing of my motorcycle, and by sharp flashes of my motorcycle lamp. There is nobody on the road except for a few drowsy watchmen—but they are everywhere—and, now and then, there is a coolie trudging under his pikoel [Malay for burden carried on shoulders]. . . [Then] the somber tops of the mountains . . . the air becomes rosy. . .\      The road takes me through a Chinese cemetery. There are graves on the left, and graves on the right; a city of the dead—or so it looks to me—and it stretches out in the vastness. Where the cemetery ends, there are sawahs [Malay for wet rice fields], a bridge, then sawahs, and again a bridge.106\ There were villages with nobody, as the club chairman described it in one of his trip reports, "merely a couple of wretched huts, a market, and a chicken I ran over . . . in a Chinese toko [Malay for shop] I got gas."107\ Accidents happened, and the language of Magneet handled them well, too. A motorcycle crashed into a grobak, a native horse-driven cart. A native girl was killed as she crossed a road:\ Fatal accident . . . A motorcyclist, in a cloud of dust, found himself, suddenly, against a native on a bicycle, coming from the opposite side. Various Europeans, men living in the neighborhood, declared that the native was bingoeng [Malay for confused], and that he zigzagged on the road in a most awkward way. . .108\      On the road between Klender and Bekassi, traffic was blocked by a grobak pushed from behind by three evidently drunk natives. We base the suspicion of alcohol on the fact that the cart on the narrow road was pushed in an extremely odd manner. On honking by a Sacoche motor-tricycle, the cart moved to the left, barely enough that it could be passed. But, when a Sarolea motorcycle began to honk, the fellows with the cart, who had to be absolute idiots, swung the said grobak in their good-natured stupidity to the middle of the road in a diagonal direction! Then, the scoundrels just stopped and waited. . . All three natives have already been punished for their "performance."109\      Collision. Mr. W. A. van den Capellen of Bekasi Road No. 3 was charged for killing with his motorcycle a native girl, called Moenah, of kampoeng [Malay for native quarter] Doereng III. The gentleman was driving without a driver's license. If he had had the license, the accident certainly would not have happened—110\      Accident Chronicle . . . on an interior road near Modjokerto, a dogcart in which wedono [high-ranking native official] of Goenoeng Gendeng was traveling was hit by a car coming from behind. The wedono was thrown out of his little carriage by the impact, and he broke his leg. The car took him home.111\ There were some hitches, inevitably. A certain Mr. Arriëns, Magneet reported, a member of the club, was beaten at a scene of one of the early Indies accidents. Evidently, he was considered by native onlookers to be the cause of the accident. He was attacked by stones first, as might be expected in the case of natives being enraged. Then, however, as Magneet reported, he was "worked over" by other means, too, including Engelschen sleutel, a monkey wrench. Fortunately, a Dutch official, an assistant-resident, came to the scene in time, and he took Mr. Arriëns away in his car.112\ There were modern-road accidents, and, naturally, they multiplied. Yet, somehow, most of the time, they appeared to Magneet to be easily dealt with. In a sort of excursion-wise way, as all the rest of the news, fleetingly, the crashes on the road were made to read as a part of the club calendar. Placed always on the same page, among other regular features, they all seemed to happen on Sundays mostly.\ Auto-terreur, "terror by automobile," breaking the rules by the natives themselves driving motor vehicles, was mentioned, in Magneet, but carefully and very rarely.113 Natives driving on modern roads were overwhelmingly those in an animal-driven cart or—instant victims and the most ephemeral figures—on bicycles. Whatever might happen to them, articulated by Magneet, they were jocular. In the language of Magneet, with a preference, they were called bruine broeders, "brown brothers," or—in a mash of English (the a` jour motor-club language) and Malay (the language of natives)—would-be toeans, "would-be-masters."114\ The monkey wrench, with which Mr. Arriëns might have been beaten, in Magneet, disappears quickly amid, virtually, heaps of language describing other tools and other technologies. There were types of motorcycles described and depicted, a most impressive instrument in itself, as one advertisement in Magneet put it, "Made Like a Gun."115 There were whole pages, naturally, on different segments of the motorcycle. As smoothness was the motivation, surface was in focus, and outer parts of the motorcycle were especially favored. Motorcycle reflectors were the most frequent and prominent presence; only the technology of honking, maybe, could compete with them. In these cases, the richness and extravagance of Magneet vocabulary peaked. Motorcycle klaxons, for instance, were claxons, autofoxen, sirenes, gabriélles, olifantenkasten.116\ In 1913, the magistrate of the city of Batavia decreed that noise and light by these very technologies had to be restrained or kept outside the city limits. Only "one-tone signal horns," for instance, were to be allowed.117 To Mr. Lankhout, however, affiliated with the Magneet motorcycle club, this was not acceptable. He went all the way to municipal court to fight for his three-tone trumpet. His campaign was followed by Magneet in detail. The frivolous technology made for a frivolous journeying, and it was, justifiably, accepted as heroic, as a struggle for the smoothness of it all. As the matter was heard in the court of Batavia and Magneet reported it, Mr. Lankhout\ had all the native deputies on his side, as they understood nothing of the entire proceedings—somebody has forgotten to translate the debate into Malay, and they were simply saying "yeah" and "yeah." Only one hoofddjaksa [native prosecutor], who could understand Dutch, voted against. In this way, Mr. Lankhout could keep his trumpet.118\ Nothing was said about the Dutch members of the court. Nothing needed to be said. Bemused, perhaps, by the native deputies' "performance," they voted for the klaxon.\ Amusement (and inner calm), Magneet has shown, might be attained by quoting natives talking. A native policeman, in yet another Magneet story, decided on one occasion to stop a Magneet motorcycle club member who sported too big a lamp ("floodlight") on his machine. The burden of the story was the native talking: Toean paké sekijnwerver tida bolé, "Mister uses lomp [sic], that's not allowed." The hilarious spelling of the technical term—it should be schijnwerper, "light thrower"—was the trump of the language-game.11 9\ As one might expect, racing was another important signature of Magneet. Even more than when on a club trip—beyond any discussion, and with absolute justification by the rules—when racing, or reading and writing about racing, one had an obligation to be impatient, and to have a zero tolerance for everything on the road that might impede the smoothness of cruising. The bingoeng, "perplexed," natives—simply, by purely technological means, by the very nature of the race—were excluded. The biggest race Magneet reported, the "Java Races," took place in 1915. The first prize was to belong to the motorcyclist, who, any time during September and October, could cover the distance between Batavia and Surabaya in the shortest time.120 A Magneet club member, P. Heidsieck, made the trip on September 29 and 30 in thirty hours, and his report of the race was published in the magazine:\ Allah! My fears were well founded. . . First, the damned baggage carrier! . . . Then: hey, all of you, the Dutchmen with some authority and with that "ethical approach" to it! . . . you are so eager to teach our brown brother to read and write you are busily turning him into a Western dandy . . . if you can only teach him to decently keep on the left side of the road as I am passing by on my motorcycle. If he just can learn this . . . he may, then, also become my brown brother I am truly fed up with all the grobak carts that compel me to reduce my speed. These fellows always wait until it is too late to get past them. You may think that they are afraid of klaxon. You should know better! Only my motorcycle Fallot lamp stirs some respect in them.121\ Power in the late-colonial Indies, as Magneet language had it, could only be as potent as it was race-like, and racy. In August 1915, the Dutch governor-general of the Indies made an unprecedented inspection tour throughout an extensive area of Central Java. For the first time in the history of the colony, a large part of the tour was made in an automobile. The tour description spread over several consecutive issues of Magneet. The language of Magneet in the unusually long narrative was wholly uninhibited, and nowhere did it come to such fruition as in this case:\ Central Java . . . August 1915 . . . Hundreds of kilometers are being covered by the governor general in a couple of days, sometimes at a racing speed Le circuit through 5 Provinces. . . an average speed 40 km/h! . . . we are in the old town of Cheribon. Why was the road not cleared before we came? Bang! Clack! Just in an instant, and I might have a foreleg of a deeleman horse in my car . . . anything like that should not happen, naturally The road along the sea [in contrast], is good, and we can travel at a steady speed. There are no carts moving, no, naturally there are none; . . . the order is well maintained. The road is entirely for us. Yippee, driver!122\ There was not much, in the smooth language of Magneet, about pavement or asphalt. It was too early for this, perhaps. Only on one or two occasions, the club members complained about the roads being "bad, and covered merely by that hateful rubble."123\ In another Indies text four to six years younger than Magneet, and more on the serious, almost scholarly, side, the hardness of the road had already become the main issue. H.F. Tillema, the author of the text, came to the Indies at the end of the nineteenth century, and he became an owner of a big pharmacy in the city of Semarang. Early in the twentieth century, Tillema was involved in Semarang politics, and was elected a city councilor. He wrote extensively about the Indies. Among many other things, he was an organizer of some of the early motor races in the colony.124 Tillema left the Indies shortly before World War I broke out, and, in Europe in 1920, he published his treatise on colonial roads.\ Like IJzerman, the prospector of the Sumatra colonial railway, Tillema wrote as a pioneer, but unlike IJzerman, he had no patience with his roads' untamed parts. Tillema sensed the hardness of the modern roads and was on the hardness side. Like Kartini, Tillema believed in progress as cleanness; his, also, was a clinical cleanness—a pharmacy cleanness, indeed. Unlike Kartini, however, he was determined never to let himself be carried away by some boyish dreams.\ Hardness was needed. "In Semarang," Tillema opened his article, the famous "Road of Daendels," the road built as far back as 1811, the pride of the Dutch in the colony, the most significant connection between the east and the west of Java, had become "one big latrine."125 There was too much dirt on the road, and the dirt, Tillema carefully made it clear, came from the outside, from the beyond of the modern road. "The market people arriving from near and afar" brought the dirt on their feet. "Often," Tillema added, they defecated on the road, "sometimes in the very middle of it."126 Day after day, Tillema wrote, "Siddin, so let us call the native garden boy," dumped the garbage from his master's house "from the kitchen and stalls," "instead of in the trash container," "over the fence," "with his gentle hand," upon the road.127\ This was stofjeremiade, "dust jeremiad," Tillema wrote. Modern motor vehicles moving with some speed, and then using brakes, trams, trains, and bicycles, but most of all, "namely, the animal-driven grobak carts, buses and trucks, with their wheels and tires worn out and on totally off-centered axles"—vehicles so loved by the native Siddins, by the way, Tillema added128—they rode over "the feces of men, horses, and buffaloes, and made them into dust." The dust, then, got off the ground, all over the place, and it was inwaait, "blown into," open windows, especially of the houses near the modern road:\ It has been noticed by those who pass through the area between 5 and 6 3.3. that on the Boeloe section of the road, for instance, the layer of dust is several centimeters thick. As it is raised by bicycles, cars, and carts, people are infected by plague, cholera, typhus, and other things like that.129\      It is widely known that the high child mortality, to a large extent, is caused by the dust, and that the inhaling of the dust, either organic or inorganic, causes serious throat, nose, and lung disorders . . . the dust of the road is a most serious threat to the health; it may be a matter of life and death . . .130 Typhus spreads through the air. Pneumonia, also . . . and other pathogenic organisms as well.131\ Sometimes, a little piece of stone, even, might be catapulted off the road by a passing vehicle, and the missile might be blown into a house, our house: "From

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsPreface1Language as Asphalt1Bare Feet1Hard and Clean Roads4Struggle for the Roads8Language-game18Bahasa Indonesia, "Indonesian Language"312Towers43Homes on Wheels and Floating Homes43The Cities52The Camps60The Towers733From Darkness to Light85The City of Light85Dactyloscopy97The Floodlight103The Sublime112The Mirror1204Indonesian Dandy129The Dolls129The Modern Times130Nationalism and the Birth of the Dandy143The Death of the Dandy147The Parade1545Let Us Become Radio Mechanics161The Metaphor161The Thing166The Voice174The Closed Circuits182The Mechanics189Epilogue: Only the Deaf Can Hear Well193Sjahrir Recalled193Memories of Holland197Time in Three Dimensions202Bacteria204The Splendid Radio207The Mouth of Karundeng210Sportsmen-Dandies-Jokers-Engineers215Ear Culture220The Happy End222Notes235Sources285Index303

\ Pacific Affairs - Tineke Hellwig\ A thought-provoking study. . . . Recommended reading for anyone who studie this period of Indonesian history.\ \ \ \ \ American Historical Review - James R. Rush\ As no other book has done, this one conveys the feel and flavor of modernity as it took root in the early twentieth-century Indonesia.\ \ \ Technology and CultureA striking and deeply engaging historical study. . . . In tracing this history, Rudolf Mrazek takes the reader on a journey, sometimes strange, through the jungles, laboratories, houses, trains, and latrines of late-colonial life. He also brings to life a cast of historical characters . . . who used everything from toilets to airplanes as tools for articulating and reflecting upon what it meant to be modern in the Indies. . . . Mraze develops his theoretical insights with a light hand through the telling of an original history that takes surprising and quirky turns.\ \ \ \ \ Journal of Asian StudiesEngineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony is a wonderfully moody book. Moody, because it aims at capturing the aura of the Dutch East Indies in the last seventy-five years of colonial rule almost as much as it attempts to tell a critical, historical story. Wonderful, because it succeeds at this project better than any other book that I have read about this particular time and place. One feels as if time travel has been accomplished by the time that the last page is reached. . . . We do not so much analyze the world of this Dutch colony from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century as we live in it for three hundred pages. . . . It really should be read by anyone who cares about Indonesia.\ \ \ \ \ Pacific AffairsA thought-provoking study. . . . Recommended reading for anyone who studie this period of Indonesian history.\ — Tineke Hellwig\ \ \ \ \ American Historical ReviewAs no other book has done, this one conveys the feel and flavor of modernity as it took root in the early twentieth-century Indonesia.\ — James R. Rush\ \ \ \ \ Technology and CultureA striking and deeply engaging historical study. . . . In tracing this history, Rudolf Mrazek takes the reader on a journey, sometimes strange, through the jungles, laboratories, houses, trains, and latrines of late-colonial life. He also brings to life a cast of historical characters . . . who used everything from toilets to airplanes as tools for articulating and reflecting upon what it meant to be modern in the Indies. . . . Mraze develops his theoretical insights with a light hand through the telling of an original history that takes surprising and quirky turns.\ — Joshua Barker\ \ \ \ \ Journal of Asian StudiesEngineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony is a wonderfully moody book. Moody, because it aims at capturing the aura of the Dutch East Indies in the last seventy-five years of colonial rule almost as much as it attempts to tell a critical, historical story. Wonderful, because it succeeds at this project better than any other book that I have read about this particular time and place. One feels as if time travel has been accomplished by the time that the last page is reached. . . . We do not so much analyze the world of this Dutch colony from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century as we live in it for three hundred pages. . . . It really should be read by anyone who cares about Indonesia.\ — Eric Tagliacozzo\ \ \ \ \ Journal of Asian StudiesEngineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony is a wonderfully moody book. Moody, because it aims at capturing the aura of the Dutch East Indies in the last seventy-five years of colonial rule almost as much as it attempts to tell a critical, historical story. Wonderful, because it succeeds at this project better than any other book that I have read about this particular time and place. One feels as if time travel has been accomplished by the time that the last page is reached. . . . We do not so much analyze the world of this Dutch colony from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century as we live in it for three hundred pages. . . . It really should be read by anyone who cares about Indonesia.\ — Eric Tagliacozzo\ \