Taman Siswa and the Indonesian National Awakening

Adjustment to foreign-imposed change is both difficult and humiliating, and the early response of the Javanese elite to European conquest was to save what they could by denying the foreigners culturally while conceding to them politically. This reaction brought a flowering of Javanese high culture, but it also made that style of life seem increasingly remote and irrelevant to the problems of the time. By the late nineteenth century some people were beginning to urge accomodation to the alien system that,however unfamiliar and unpleasant, seemed to contain the future. They came, in this beginning period, from those members of the elite who were well enough placed to acquaint themselves with western culture and also sufficiently on the periphery of the traditional system to be able to consider the old order with some detachment and to find profit in its modification. These advocates were to be found first of all among the bupati (regents) of what had been the outer lands of the realm, whose desire to maximize freedom from the political-cultural center encouraged an openness to outside ideas and a predeliction for the role of mediator. The "progressive" bupati were naturally from among the more intellectually daring of that class, and above all they represented its younger generation, whose vision of the world was set by exposure to western education, by a greater consciousness of European penetration, and by a more acute realization of the decay of the traditional order than had prevailed when their fathers' view of life had been formed.