Impressions sur Java
THIRTEENTH CAHIER OF THE FOURTH SERIES
CAHIER OF DISPATCHES
FELICIEN CHALLAYE
Impressions of Java
FRANCOIS DAGEN
dispatch from Algeria
BERNARD-LAZARE
Jews of Romania
CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE
appearing twenty times per year
PARIS
8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor
To learn what the Cahiers de la Quinzaine are, one need only send a money order for three francs fifty to Mr. Andre Bourgeois, administrator of the cahiers, 8, rue de la Sorbonne, Paris. One will receive as samples six cahiers from the second and third series.
We put this cahier into commerce; we sell it for one franc.
Charles Peguy
On the dispatches of the cahiers — dispatches from China, dispatches from Indo-China, dispatches from Japan, dispatches from Finland, dispatch from Russia, cahier on Armenia, cahier on Romania, dispatches from France — published in the first three series of the cahiers, in particular on the dispatches of Felicien Challaye, refer to the Sixth cahier of the fourth series, dispatch cahier, inventory of the cahiers, in the form of a catalogue, a cahier of 72 pages, one franc.
The dispatch one is about to read was published for the first time in Jean-Pierre, a newspaper for children, 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor, Paris, fifth arrondissement; Challaye put it back into form, and into age, for the cahiers. It is also in Jean-Pierre that there had appeared, by Rene Salome, that Monsieur Matou of which we made such a fine cahier on the first of January.
Impressions of Java
Felicien Challaye
Fragments of a journal
Batavia
Wednesday, November 28, 1900
First impressions of the city, the inhabitants, the hotel, the club.
Batavia is an immense city, or rather an immense garden. Trees everywhere; parks around all the houses. The area occupied must be astonishingly vast; the distances are prodigious. To make a few arrival visits, I travel for entire hours in one of those light little carriages where the native coachman and the traveler find themselves seated back to back: whence, it seems, their name of sado. Canals, full of a yellowish water, cross the city on all sides, cutting at right angles: we are here in Holland, a tropical Holland.
A few neighborhoods glimpsed this morning left in my memory a more distinct image: old Batavia, with canals bordered by more or less abandoned warehouses; the quarter of banks and commercial houses, the only one where European dwellings all touch; an immense plain, Koenigsplein, a vast treeless prairie surrounded by pretty hotels.
In the street, many natives, with brown skin, well-made bodies, overly accentuated facial features. The women, wrapped in their sarong, sometimes have a truly sculptural beauty. All day long, in the yellowish waters of the canals, the entire population bathes: children, young people, young girls, men and women of every age. Other women wash laundry there. The wet garment, clinging to the body, reveals the harmony of beautiful forms: these groups of bathers and washer-women are picturesque and beguiling.
Many Chinese also in the streets, their heads covered with pointed hats, their queues continued very low by threads of black or red silk. Most are shopkeepers or merchants; some are quite wealthy; their quarter presents a rather prosperous appearance. But they are despised and held at a distance by the Europeans. In terms of numbers, the Chinese constitute a rather significant element of the population.
The Europeans are little numerous compared to the natives; but they are the masters. They live in spacious, comfortable houses, surrounded by gardens. They have a crowd of servants at their disposal. Their life seems easy and pleasant, at least in its material aspect. But the climate is exhausting; the heat is oppressive; the rainy season, which begins in November, makes the air heavy and unbearable.
I am staying at the Hotel des Indes, a vast establishment that seems to be the meeting place for all European travelers. The rooms are huge, with very high ceilings; the beds are draped with mosquito nets. One dines in a large common hall where the fans slowly turn. The cooking is Dutch, that is to say abundant and heavy.
In the evening, I went to the Concordia club, where European society meets. One plays billiards, reads newspapers, drinks beer. The atmosphere is that of a colonial club: heavy, masculine, a little boring. The men talk about business, about hunting, about the latest regulations of the government. The women, in light dresses, sit apart in wicker chairs and chat quietly.
What strikes me most in this first contact with Java is the extraordinary luxuriance of the vegetation. Coming from the dryness of the Red Sea and of Aden, one is dazzled by this explosion of greenery. The trees are enormous; the foliage is of an intense, almost black green; the flowers are enormous too, violent in color: red, purple, yellow. Everything grows with a sort of fury, as if the earth could not contain its own fecundity. And amidst all this, the human beings seem small, a little lost, overwhelmed by this prodigious nature.
Buitenzorg
Thursday, November 29, 1900
Excursion to Buitenzorg, the residence of the Governor-General. One takes the train from Batavia; the journey lasts about two hours. The railroad follows the plain at first, then begins to climb into the mountains. The landscape changes: one leaves behind the flatness and the heat; the air becomes fresher; the vegetation, while remaining tropical, takes on a different character. One sees terraced rice paddies climbing the hillsides, admirably regular, reflecting the sky in their mirrors of water.
Buitenzorg is a charming town, cooler than Batavia because of its altitude. The Governor-General’s palace is a large white building in the colonial style, surrounded by a magnificent park. But what is truly remarkable is the Botanical Garden, one of the most beautiful in the world. It was founded at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the Dutch and has since been constantly enriched and improved. It covers an immense area; the trees are labeled; the specimens come from all the tropical regions of the globe. One walks there for hours, in the shade of giant banyans whose aerial roots descend from the branches to the ground, forming veritable colonnades. There are groves of bamboo, whose stems rise straight and slender to a prodigious height. There are collections of palms, of orchids, of ferns. There is a lake covered with the enormous leaves of the Victoria regia. The whole has an air of order and magnificence that bears witness to the scientific spirit and the administrative ability of the Dutch.
I noticed the natives working in the garden: they are gentle, docile, apparently content with their lot. One of them showed me, with an expression of pride, the remarkable specimens under his care. But I wondered what he thought, deep down, of these European masters who had transformed his island into a vast laboratory and plantation.
The Javanese
Friday, November 30, 1900
I am beginning to form an impression of the Javanese character. These people are gentle, polite, deferential. They greet you with a slight inclination of the body, the hands joined before the chest. They speak in a low voice, with a sort of musical intonation. They seem never to be in a hurry. Their movements are slow, graceful, harmonious. Even their work has something of the quality of a dance.
But beneath this gentleness, one senses a deep reserve, an impenetrable mystery. The Javanese does not reveal himself to the European. He smiles, he is obliging, he answers your questions: but you feel that he is keeping his real self hidden, that behind the mask of courtesy there lies a soul that you cannot reach. This is perhaps the most troubling impression that Java makes on the visitor: the feeling that one is surrounded by a people of admirable politeness and apparent docility, whose true thoughts and feelings remain absolutely unknown.
The Javanese have a very refined artistic sense. Their batik fabrics are marvels of delicacy and taste. Their music, strange to European ears, has a complexity and a subtlety that only prolonged listening can reveal. Their shadow puppet theater, the wayang, is a form of dramatic art of great beauty and profundity. The performances last all night; the puppets, cut from leather and painted in vivid colors, are manipulated by a single artist, the dalang, who also recites the text and directs the orchestra. The stories are drawn from the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which the Javanese have adapted to their own genius. Through these performances, the ancient myths are kept alive in the consciousness of the people.
The social organization of Java rests on the village community, the desa. Each village has its chief, its council of elders, its customs, its traditions. The land belongs in principle to the community; it is distributed among the families according to need. This system has been maintained, in its essentials, by the Dutch, who have found it convenient to govern through the traditional chiefs. But the introduction of European commerce and industry is beginning to disrupt these ancient structures. The need for money, the attraction of the cities, the plantation work that draws the peasants away from their villages: all this is slowly undermining the old social order.
What will become of the Javanese when this order has completely disappeared? This is the great question that the colonization of Java poses. The Dutch have been, on the whole, relatively enlightened colonizers. They have maintained the native institutions, respected the native religions, developed education, built roads and railroads, introduced public health measures. But they have also exploited the land and the labor of the natives for their own profit. The “culture system,” established in the early nineteenth century, obliged the Javanese to devote a portion of their land and their labor to the cultivation of products destined for the European market: sugar, coffee, indigo, tobacco. This system, though officially abolished, has left its traces in the economic structure of the island.
The question of colonization is, for a socialist, one of the most difficult and the most troubling. Can one justify the subjection of one people by another? Can the material benefits that the colonizer brings — roads, schools, hospitals — compensate for the loss of independence and the destruction of traditional ways of life? These are questions to which I have not yet found an answer; and the beauty of Java, the gentleness of its people, the magnificence of its nature, only make the question more poignant.
The Temples
Saturday, December 1, 1900
I visited today the ruins of the great Buddhist temple of Borobudur, in central Java. The journey from Batavia takes a full day by train. The temple stands on a hill, in the midst of a landscape of rice fields and coconut palms. It dates from the ninth century; it was buried for centuries under volcanic ash and tropical vegetation; it was cleared and restored by the Dutch in the nineteenth century.
Nothing had prepared me for the grandeur and beauty of this monument. It is an enormous structure, built in the form of a stepped pyramid, with nine terraces. The lower terraces are square; the upper terraces are circular. The galleries of the lower terraces are lined with bas-reliefs representing scenes from the life of the Buddha and from Buddhist legend. These bas-reliefs are of an extraordinary fineness of execution and a remarkable power of expression. The figures are graceful, the compositions harmonious, the details of vegetation and architecture rendered with loving precision. On the circular terraces stand bell-shaped stupas, each containing a statue of the Buddha in meditation. At the summit, a large central stupa dominates the whole.
One climbs slowly from terrace to terrace, following the galleries of bas-reliefs. The ascent is a spiritual journey as much as a physical one: one passes from the world of desire to the world of form, and from the world of form to the world of formlessness. At the top, in the silence and the light, one looks out over the immense plain, with its rice fields, its palms, its distant volcanoes — and one understands why this was chosen as a place of meditation and worship.
The Javanese I met near the temple seemed to regard it with a mixture of pride and indifference. They are Muslims now, for the most part; Buddhism disappeared from Java centuries ago. But the temple remains, a witness to a civilization that was once among the most brilliant in Asia.