The Dutch Royal Institute for Linguistics and Anthropology (KITLV) in Leiden has proposed a new inquiry into what actually happened in the conflict between the Netherlands and the Republic in the years 1945-1949. But it will differ from earlier inquiries, that focused on Dutch excesses, in that this time around there will also be attention for the actions of the TNI and the para military groups.

‘The Retreat’ by J. Eijkelboom, Part IV, the Conclusion, continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

‘The Retreat’ by J. Eijkelboom, Part III. Continued from parts 1 and 2.

‘The Retreat’ by J. Eijkelboom, Part II, continued from Part 1.

Jan Eijkelboom was trained in England to ‘fight against the Japs’ but, as it happened, he was drafted to fight in the Indies when the Japanese had long gone. He arrived in Java in the middle of 1947 and served there as a sergeant for 2 1/2 years. In later life he functioned, inter alia, as editor of the renowned/notorious Amsterdam student paper “Propria Cures” and the leftist weekly “Vrij Nederland”. Apart from his journalistic activities he has published about half a dozen bundles of poetry. I have translated here his ‘short’ story “The Retreat” (“De Terugtocht”) that was first published in 1953 in the literary magazine “Libertinage”. It is rather a long “short story” and this is only the first part. Two or three more are to follow.

On the date of today, in 1962, then President Sukarno gave his yearly Independence Day speech of which the English version received that year the title ‘A Year of Triumph’. The then very recent New York or Bunker Agreement between Indonesia and the Netherlands in which Papua was, under certain conditions, handed over to Indonesia explains the title.

“One of the rajas of Badung who once discussed Van der Tuuk with me said very peculiarly of him; “There is in the whole of Bali only one man who knows and understands Balinese and that man is Gusti Dertik”

from Dr. Julius Jacobs , “Eenigen tijd onder de Baliers”, 1883

Van der Tuuk used the time in Holland (1857-1868) to work on the rich material he had brought from the Batak lands. But he had a combatative disposition and got involved in a lot of polemics. His main target was the orientalist Taco Roorda who enjoyed great, and according to Van der Tuuk undeserved, authority in Holland. The linguist thought, among other things, that Roorda’s idea of Javanese as a foundational language from which all other Indonesian languages were derived was nonsense, a judgment with which modern authorities agree.

Gusti Dertik (Dr.Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk) was, so we are told, the greatest nineteenth century Western student of Indonesian languages, possibly rivaled only by Brandes, a quite different type of scholar (and different type of human being). He laid the foundation for the comparative study of Indonesian languages by the formulation of two phonetic laws “without which”, according to the later testimony of the scholar of Malay Van Ronkel , “no scientific treatment of an Indonesian language is possible.”

The second part of a translation of a story entitled “The Clan” in which pre-war Dutch journalist Willem Walraven tells about his Sundanese wife Itih, and her family. Read the first part – A Pre-War “Mixed” Marriage.