A sample of perspectives: Rick Honings sought and found new perspectives on Indonesia
Anyone who wanted to get an impression of the Dutch East Indies between 1800 and 1945 quickly turned to travel literature. Large groups of readers devoured non-fiction accounts of the island empire on the other side of the world – and were given a one-sided picture. Most of the sources that reached the Dutch market were written by white men. With his VIDI project, Professor Rick Honings adds new perspectives.
Honings worked for five years with an interdisciplinary team on the VIDI project ‘Voicing the Colony’, which juxtaposed the dominant Dutch perspective with that of marginalised groups. ‘Dutch language specialists and South and Southeast Asian Studies specialists often work separately, partly because the language policy adopted by the Netherlands meant that Indonesians didn’t learn Dutch,’ says Honings. ‘In Leiden too, the disciplines are still located at different institutes and even in different buildings. We wanted to bring those worlds together.’
Different voices within one group
This has resulted in various publications by Honings and postdoctoral researcher Judith E. Bosnak, in which Dutch and Indonesian perspectives are compared. ‘We saw that many Indonesians appreciated the Dutch,’ says Honings, ‘probably because travelers often belonged to the elite. They collaborated with the Dutch and were often quite positive, although there was also room for more critical perspectives.’
These differences within a single group are also visible when you zoom in on travel reports written in Dutch, as Honings himself did. ‘We have reports from naturalists, ministers, missionaries, civil servants, military personnel, tourists, men, women, and children,’ he sums up. ‘They all looked at things through colonial eyes, but they all saw something different. For the naturalist, the Dutch East Indies was often a wonderful voyage of discovery into an unexplored area that they could take complete possession of, while soldiers wrote about indigenous people, whom they often dismissed as enemies that had to be fought.’
Outsider perspective offers freedom
At the same time, more radical and sometimes anti-colonial voices could also be heard within this group. Honings: ‘This was often the case with women. Although their texts also contain many colonial prejudices, they often stood outside the male world of colonial administration, which sometimes gave them more scope for anti-colonial criticism.’
This ‘outsider perspective’ can also be found among other people who occupied an intermediate position. Honings: ‘For example, we have published an unknown travel story by the Indonesian writer Dé-Lilah, who, thanks to her European father and Indonesian mother, had roots in two cultures and therefore viewed the Indies, but also the English colonies, for example, very differently from many Dutch people. Marijke Denger, the second postdoctoral researcher in the project, has researched those English perspectives in comparison with the Dutch ones.’
Advancing time and technology
While the different perspectives in one place and at one point in time already formed a mosaic of opinions and views, advancing time and (technical) developments produced even more diverse visions. ‘PhD candidate Nick Tomberge has researched how accommodation and transportation influenced perspectives on the colony,’ says Honings. ‘Hotels began to appear at the end of the nineteenth century. Transport also changed. The car increased mobility in the colony. On the one hand, this increased the distance from the land, because you could reach relatively isolated accommodations relatively quickly, while at the same time it fostered a sense of closeness, because the driver was often Indonesian. This development is also reflected in the digital (bilingual) exhibition that we created together.’
This marks a significant start to the polyphonic perspective that Honings had in mind five years ago. ‘I think we have succeeded in showing that multitude of voices and in giving marginalised voices a chance to be heard,’ he says, ‘although there are of course still many sources that have not been researched, even in our own Asian Library alone.’
As part of the Voicing the Colony project, Honings and lecturer-researcher Coen van 't Veer have launched De Postkoloniale podcast, in which they talk to prominent researchers and writers about their work in relation to the colonial past. The podcast will continue after the project has ended.