In a 2005 documentary made on his life by a Norwegian admirer of his work, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, one of the greatest literary chroniclers of the 20th century, recalls an anecdote surrounding his arrest in 1965. Right before Sukarno (1901–1970) was overthrown by a military coup, in September 1965 (with active support from the Eisenhower administration of the United States and the CIA) a secret police officer of the emerging right-wing regime of Suharto (1921–2008) would often visit the house of Pram, as Pramoedya has been affectionately called by his admirers. By then, Pramoedya had already established himself as a leading writer and journalist in the fledgling nation. The political criticism was always subtle and wisely implicit in his writings, but Pram’s (as he was popularly called) left-leaning views were well known, especially through his position as the head of the People’s Cultural Organisation, a cultural wing of Indonesia’s Communist Party (PKI). Pramoedya narrates how after the September coup, the secret police officer, who was till then disguising himself as a friend and well-wisher of the family, became blunter in expressing the agenda of the new regime. He said, “Brother Pram, the situation has changed now, I am now the cat who plays with you: the mouse.”
This compelling metaphor would hardly unsettle the then-40-year-old writer: a significant part of his adult life has been spent resisting the persecution and repression of authoritarian regimes. Dutch colonial regime imprisoned him between 1947 and 1949, during Indonesia’s war for independence. Later, in 1960, he was again imprisoned by Sukarno’s military for nine months – for criticising the regime for its harsh and discriminatory treatment of the Indonesian Chinese.
A dissident voice
This persecution, however, would eclipse all previous attempts to curb Pramoedya’s free expression. Weeks after the coup, he was arrested along with thousands of others for being a “Communist.” (Later, in an interview, Pramoedya would clearly say that he has never read Marx, but he is always on the side of justice and fairness.) Termed a “political prisoner,” Pram’s books were burned and banned from circulation by the regime. He was imprisoned without a trial, first on an island on the southern coast of Java till 1969, and then sent to the remote island of Buru, in the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago. The conditions of the prison were appalling, and Pramoedya suffered years of abuse and torture.
Buru would be a transformative experience for Pramoedya and would consolidate his global literary legacy. Even seeing a pen or paper would result in harsh punishment in Buru prison, so the writer started telling stories to his fellow prisoners. These stories would form the basis of his iconic Buru Quartet: This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, and House of Glass. The novels portray the life of Minke: a young Javanese aristocrat (based on the short but spectacular early 20th century life of Indonesian journalist Tirto Adhi Soerjo) whose personal life journeys are closely intertwined with the early independence struggle against the Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia.
The story of Minke proved to be hugely popular among Pram’s fellow political prisoners, who extended their support by often taking on the writer’s share of forced labour, giving him more time to think and develop the stories. Eventually, Pramoedya would be able to write down the novels, eluding the gaze of the prison officials. Soon, the words spread outside the confines of the prison. Authors like Gunter Grass campaigned for his release. Jean-Paul Sartre, in a moving act of solidarity, sent him a typewriter. The restrictions would ease a little bit from 1973, and Pramoedya was released from prison in 1979. He would still have to be under house arrest till 1992. Meanwhile, his books were still banned in Indonesia, the ban would be lifted as late as 2010. Yet, they were also smuggled out of the country with the help of the writer’s associates and friends, among them a German priest. The Buru Quartet, would eventually be published between 1980 and 1988, and they are now available in English with the able translation of Australian translator and academic Max Lane.
During the short period between his release and death in 2006, Pramoedya had been justly celebrated as one of the leading dissident literary voices of the 20th century, along with Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, and Ma Thida. Political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson called Pramoedya “one of the grandest modern writers” of Indonesia. However, as his centenary beckons, there are very few events celebrating his fascinating life and oeuvre globally. For a start, there is very little in Indian English media be it in print, digital, or in panel discussions, at the height of the lit-fest season. This seems strange, considering not only Pramoedya’s profound influence in world literature in chronicling the racist and capitalist foundations of Western colonialism but also India’s culturally deep ties with Indonesia: a country of a staggering diversity and historical richness.
While this year there have already been some public events celebrating Pramoedya in Indonesia, it seems he is now a relatively obscure figure in the nation’s cultural memory. This process of forgetting Pramoedya, especially in his native country, has been both gradual and systematic. As Max Lane pointed out as early as 2015: “There has been no public announcement that his writings are no longer banned – they may very well still be formally banned. His works are not introduced, or even mentioned, in the high school curriculum for Indonesian language or literature in state schools…. The novels are barely studied at university level.”
As Lane points out, Indonesia’s contemporary social realities are crucial in understanding this phenomenon, where both political authoritarianism and inequalities deeply persist. Pramoedya came into prominence, first during the anti-colonial and then during the anti-totalitarian struggle. As Indonesia rapidly modernised during the post-Suharto era, Pram’s radical and politically resonant narratives, which evoked nationalist idealism, started losing relevance in the new millennium.
The realities of today’s Indonesia, and indeed, the whole world, need Pramoedya’s voice more than ever before. Yet, elites in Indonesia probably avoid recognising his work, as he advocated with equal force for a social revolution, not just a political one. Pramoedya’s writings offer a stark critique of state power everywhere, and they also question the dominant narratives or collective memory formation. Finally, he was among the very few writers who combined a socialist and environmentalist message in the 20th century, long before it was fashionable during the era of accelerated climate change. Pramoedya’s deeply rooted writings demonstrated a stark reality that upper-caste elites strenuously avoided linking in post-colonial societies: that capitalist enterprise, racism, and environmental exploitation are three pillars of colonialism. His early life, his major works, and the ecological awareness in his writings bear witness to this conviction.
Early life and youth
Pramoedya Ananta Toer was born in the town of Blora on the island of Java on February 6, 1925, in a culturally privileged family. His father Toer was a schoolmaster, and his mother Saidah was a rice trader. Both of them were well educated and spoke Dutch quite well. However, the family was large (Pramoedya was the firstborn of nine children), and their economic fortune steadily declined. Both his parents were staunch nationalists and supporters of Sukarno’s revolutionary cause. Toer faced repercussions from Dutch colonial authorities for teaching a nationalist curriculum in his school: his teaching license was revoked. Saidah had to balance gruelling housework with informal gig work to keep them going. Pramoedya would later say how his parents taught him the value of dignity, conviction, and hard work. Saidah encouraged him to treat all forms of labour with respect, and Pram, as a teenager, worked as a goat herder. His parents were also an early influence on him for their gift of storytelling, poetry, and singing.
Pramoedya’s formal education did not progress very far. He completed a radio production diploma course in Surabaya in 1941–42 but came back to Blora as the threat of the Japanese invasion of Indonesia loomed large. The Japanese arrival at Blora in the spring of 1942 shook him profoundly, and soon after, his mother died of tuberculosis at the young age of 34. Pramoedya moved to Jakarta, juggling part-time school and work as a typist for a Japanese news service. He was travelling across the country when the thrilling news of the Indonesian independence declaration reached him on August 17, 1945. However, the country would still be under great political turmoil, fighting against the Dutch, until the transfer of sovereignty in 1949.
During this period, Pramoedya plunged himself into the nationalist cause, both as a political activist and as a journalist, ultimately embracing prison at Bukit Duri in Jakarta. This was also the period when his fiction was getting noticed. Pram was writing from his childhood, but his years as a revolutionary was the first serious impetus for writing novels that chronicle his years as a runway revolutionary amidst a stormy political climate. His first serious success, however, was the short novel Perburuan (The Fugitive), published in 1949, after winning a major literary award. Set during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia and structured as a shadow-puppet play, the novel tells the story of an army officer whose desire for a revolt is thwarted after a betrayal from a close comrade.
The novel immediately put Pramoedya on Indonesia’s literary map, and his output was prolific in the next decade as a writer, journalist, editor, and translator. His writings during this time, including the semi-autobiographical novel It’s Not an All-Night Fair (1951), reflected Pramoedya’s growing disillusionment with the state of affairs in the newly independent Indonesia: still controlled by a corrupt and feudal elite, still in collaboration with Dutch colonialists. As the country was still struggling with poverty, corruption, and social discord, Pram’s restless mind was expanding. Exposure abroad (with foreign stints, first in the Netherlands and then in Communist-ruled China) and the influence of Marxist writer and AS Dharta (1924–2007) pushed Pram deeper into considering the connections between colonialist and capitalist exploitation. Defying the stigma of being branded a Communist, he became involved with left-wing and progressive political resistance against Sukarno, leading to his arrest.
Major themes in Pramoedya’s writings
Pramoedya had a great ability to convey both a broad view of Indonesian history, and a granular understanding of its richly divergent society, with great pathos and empathy in his writings. The broad view concerned Indonesia’s postcolonial struggle, confronted with multipolar forces of democracy, communism, and authoritarianism. But as we delve deeper, his writings seem equally relevant today as trenchant social critiques of prevailing social norms in Indonesian society that ultimately serve as the undercurrents for these broader political forces. One of the ways Pramoedya addresses this is through his sympathetic portrayal of female characters and his staunch critique of patriarchy in his works.
In his early short story Inem (1950), we witness the tragedy of an eight-year-old young girl, the eponymous protagonist, being married to a wealthy farmer’s son. The story’s narrator, Inem’s six-year-old friend Muk, encapsulates the binding tragedy of this story: the loss of childhood-innocence along with the brutal marginalisation of women in impoverished rural communities. Inem’s mother works as a batik maker, and for her, the marriage of her daughter is determined by economic compulsions. As Inem gets beaten up by her husband, she returns home, but her return is treated with cruelty by both her and Muk’s family. The narrator paints a grim picture in the final lines of the story: “And then, the nine-year-old widow – because she is a burden only on her parents’ household – can be beaten by anyone who wishes to, her mother, her younger brother, her uncle, her neighbor, her aunt.” Muk’s narration implies his loss of innocence as well, not only highlighting how patriarchy and gender roles can destroy a childhood but also offering a metaphor for the vulnerabilities of a fledgling nation encountering entrenched social evils.
His 1960 book Hoakiau di Indonesia (The Overseas Chinese of Indonesia) strongly condemned the discriminatory treatment of the Chinese by Sukarno’s supposedly progressive government, commenting that a major cultural reform is required to shake Indonesian society out of its hierarchical and xenophobic impulses. His fundamental belief that cultures lead politics, and vice-versa, is not the typical ideological grounding of a Marxist, and this belief has also caused suspicion among his progressive friends who were much more supportive of the Communist Party’s proposal to politically “control” cultural expressions. Women continued to play an important role in Pram’s vision of rethinking the suppressed voices in Indonesian history, notably in Gadis Pantai (Girl from the Coast) (1962): another moving and autobiographical retelling of the tragic life of the author’s biological grandmother Satima: a poor and low-caste woman abandoned by her husband.
With these narratives, Pramoedya wanted to reformulate his readers’ understanding of the Indonesian history, moving away from a colonial interpretation and putting hitherto marginalised voices, such as women and the minorities, center stage. His truly global and pluralistic intellectual outlook was certainly influenced by his extensive translation of writers like Steinbeck and Gorky, but the wide range of his reading also strengthened his conviction that cultural expressions are shaped by local realities: social, political, or ecological.
In the period right before his imprisonment, another important literary technique for Pramoedya in expressing the contingent and localised human experience was socialist realism, a mode of cultural expression influenced by the Soviet doctrine that prioritized centering the “authentic” and life of the working masses over universal expressions of individual emotions or psychologies. Historian of Southeast Asia James Rush writes how the ability of this form in posing a challenge to “militant imperialism and capitalism” influenced Pramoedya to see it is a “positive and uplifting force.” It is perhaps not a coincidence that after the Soviet dissolution, when socialist realism became obsolete, Pramoedya’s writings again became much more personal and intimate – completing a full circle.
Connecting environmental exploitation, capitalism, and colonialism
Today, Pramoedya’s writings deserve extra attention for his perceptive portrayal of connecting the economic exploitation of Indonesian people and the ecological devastation of its landscape by colonial capitalism. This thread plays a critical role in the history of colonial Indonesia, and particularly in the destruction of its Indigenous culture, and authors like Amitav Ghosh have brought global attention to this in their writings. For Pramoedya, this connection between ecological, economic, and cultural destruction was a fundamental lesson in his coming of age.
His teenage years as a farmer played a crucial role in this awareness: also teaching him not to distinguish between intellectual and physical labour. Later, he would translate Dutch writer Multatuli’s (1820–1887) iconic 1860 novel Max Havelaar; or, The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company: one of the earliest accounts of the horrors of Dutch colonial traders in the erstwhile East Indies. Multatuli’s conscientious and self-critical voice was a painfully solitary one for his age, especially drawing attention to how the greedy quest for white supremacy undergirds the so-called “civilising mission” in the colonies. For Pramoedya, too, offering a combined critique of environmental and class exploitation has been met with dismissal among his progressive peers in Indonesia, especially at a time when eco-Marxism was not in fashion, and talking about environmental justice was considered a bourgeois and reactionary fad drawing attention away from class struggle.
Pramoedya’s harsh life experiences taught him a much broader and nuanced lesson. His prison term in Buru is contextualised by the historical importance of the island as a planned site for developing crops that are ingredients for a particular kind of aromatic oil meant for global export by the Dutch. This project failed miserably, and Buru became infamous for prison labour as a new form of slavery by the New Order regime. Taking account of this, Pramoedya highlights in his Buru Quartet and other writings how the Dutch re-engineered the landscapes of Java and other parts of Indonesia to serve the imperatives of global capitalism, transforming a rich indigenous knowledge system about the local ecology into a purely extractive site for plantation agriculture: a move that continues to have both local and planetary impact.
Interestingly, in This Earth of Mankind, Minke observes this through personal connections: he marries the daughter of a Dutch factory owner. He notices how the introduction of new land allocation systems and property rights are meant to make huge profits for the Dutch with commodities such as coffee, sugar, and indigo. These commodities engender unsustainably intensive agricultural practices and, over the long term, transform the millennia-old relationships between people and their local environment. The connection between ecological devastation and racial subjugation forms a crucial basis for the Buru Quartet.
In Child of All Nations, Minke’s ecological awareness deepens further after his brief stay with a Javanese sugar cane farmer, Trunodongso. Trunodongso’s unflinching account of how farmers are brutally treated by the planters helps Minke understand that his sense of intellectual superiority relative to his fellow Indonesians is ineffective as long as the Dutch continue to subjugate his race physically with exploitation and violence. Minke’s experiences and insight in the Buru Quartet continue to hold relevance today, not only for Indonesia but for the whole planet: where capitalist greed destroys local ecosystems, causing not only irreparable physical harms to local communities but also obliterating cultural memories and indigenous knowledge systems.
After his prison term and house arrest ended, Pramoedya was not as prolific as before. But he continued to live a life of quiet courage and optimism in Jakarta. Gardening in his East Jakarta home became a newfound passion, perhaps hinting at a more solitary desire for renewing his personal connection with nature. But gardening is not just about regeneration but also sustainability and memorisation: a skill that passes from one generation to another.
I don’t know whether the global literary community remembers Pramoedya’s incredible life and work. But I certainly hope his centenary serves as an opportunity for us to advocate for an afterlife of these books in the era of the planetary climate crisis. His books can continue to teach us about Indigenous knowledge systems, the importance of the community, and the role of the intellectual in resisting state oppression. Above all, they teach us to remember our past, critically and committedly.
Let’s remember Pramoedya Ananta Toer and fight against our own oblivion.
Somak Mukherjee teaches at the University of Tubingen, Germany. He can be contacted at somakmukherjee2011@gmail.com
