The Colonial Novel in Indonesia

THE RECENT success in the United States of the translation of Maria Dermout's novel, The Ten Thousand Things,l suggests that at last a much-neglected aspect of Western literature, the work of the writers of the vanishing colonial era in Africa and Asia, may have become eligible for wider public interest. Only Kipling has attained broad popularity in this literary genre; and, strictly speaking, he is not wholly a part of it, since colonial literature is typically the product of Eurasian culture and style of living, in the knowledge and understanding of which the chronicler of Anglo-India has proved, in retrospect, to have been far from proficient. Colonial literature tends to revolve around the novel of manners, the tale of allegedly characteristic conditions in colonial society, while for a Conrad or a Maugham the tropical environment of Southeast Asia is at best only the decor for a description of universal human foibles. Even in the literature of the metropolitan powers the colonial contribution has only recently begun to attract attention; in the colonial, or former colonial, nations themselves this contribution is often mistakenly regarded as an alien element beyond the interest of the developing national literatures. The following pages, by focusing on the modern novel in the colonial epoch of Indonesia, will suggest that there is here an inadequately explored area of literary effort in the Western tradition.