Compromise and contestation in colonial Sumatra. An 1873 Mandailing schoolbook on the ‘Wonders of the West’

Abstract

S. Rodgers Compromise and contestation in colonial SumatraAn 1873 Mandailing schoolbook on the Wonders of the West In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 158 (2002), no: 3, Leiden, 479-512 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl SUSAN RODGERS Compromise and Contestation in Colonial SumatraAn 1873 Mandailing Schoolbook on the 'Wonders of the West' Introduction Language and power issues are central to the study of colonialism, as a wide stream of recent work in anthropology and history has amply shown (Rafael 1988; Fabian 1991; Kuipers 1998:22-41; Bhabha 1985,1990; Florida 1995; Sears 1996; Pemberton 1994; Dirks 1992; Thomas 1994). 'The empire wrote back', to paraphrase the title of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin's 1989 study of the rhetoric and hidden power politics of postcolonial literatures in this light.1 Print technology, folkloric writing, dictionary and grammar making, and school textbook authorship could all be captured to a degree in some colonial settings by 'the natives', who used such media (sometimes in the language of the metropole, no less) to contest their colonial subjugation. Compromise and Contestation in Colonial Sumatra 481 The culture of colonialism, however, was rarely if ever simply a stark matter of 'colonial state' versus 'local resistance', with clear-cut competing texts (Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Staler, 1997b, provide an excellent discussion of this point). [...]colonialism was often considerably fuzzier in the political, aesthetic, and moral sense than any strict 'centre' versus 'colonial periphery' model typically allows. A year after the school textbook authorities in Batavia issued Willem Iskander's Si Bulus-Bulus, Si Rumbuk-Rumbuk, the same government office published his more advanced reader, Taringot di Ragam-Ragam ni Parbinotoan Dohot Sinaloanni Alak Eropa, di Ata Mandailingkon (On the varieties of knowledge and expertise of the Europeans, put into the Mandailing language), also writtenin the Mandailing Batak language.