Manliness in Sino-Malay publications in the Netherlands Indies

Abstract

This study investigates constructions of manliness in the late-colonial Netherlands Indies (1870s–1930s), with particular reference to the so-called ‘Sino-Malay’ novels and newspapers produced by its local-born, culturally hybrid Chinese population (Peranakan). These authors incorporated ideas from South East Asia as well as China and Europe in their works, providing insights in traditional notions of heteronormative manhood, but also exposing major reconfigurations of gender within the diverse conditions of modernity. Their writings thus provide an underexplored vista into a remarkably diverse society in transition. I will centre on words used in the Malay vernacular to characterize men and male behaviour. This serves as a springboard to explore three interconnected themes surrounding manliness in Sino-Malay publications: violence, sexuality, and modernity. As will be shown, several constructions of gender and manifestations of popular culture associated with modern Indonesia were rooted in the same discourse as these colonial-era works.

• Historical linguistics
• masculinities
• modernity
• Netherlands Indies
• Sino-Malay literature

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the workshop Tracing Trajectories of Modernity in Southeast Asia (Leiden, 2014) and I thank Chie Ikeya and Ariel Heryanto for their much appreciated input during this event and afterwards. I am equally indebted to Grace Chin Voon Sheong and David Kloos for their comments on a pre-circulated draft, and to two anonymous reviewers of this journal. Responsibility for any remaining mistakes and shortcomings remains, of course, with me.

Notes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) funded my research as part of its Innovative Research incentive (‘Vernieuwingsimpuls’).

1. The majority of this collection previously belonged to the now-disbanded KITLV Library. Many works have been digitized as part of the Metamorfoze Project and are now (November 2015) available in pdf format through the online catalogue of the Leiden University Library.

2. After Indonesia’s independence, these ‘foreign’ words – many of which pertain to masculinity and other markers of power and identity – were largely replaced by vocabulary deemed indigenous (Alisjahbana, 1976).

3. While used in a pre-independence setting, the terms ‘Indonesia’ and ‘Indonesian’ are not as anachronistic as they may appear. They feature prominently in Sino-Malay publications from at least the 1920s and are ultimately rooted in European academia.

4. The term ‘masculinities’ is conventionally used in its plural form in acknowledgement of its fluid, dynamic, and potentially contradictory characteristics (Connell, 1995, 1998).

5. The oft-cited term ‘men of prowess’ (Wolters, 1999) was coined in reference to these perceived spiritual dimensions of male leadership in Southeast Asia. Unsurprisingly:ost-colonial Indonesia reveals strikingly similar constructions of gendered political power (Geertz, 1961; Suryakusuma, 2004; Wieringa, 2003).

6. More specifically, the Arabic loanword nafsu refers to ‘powerful emotions that might explode into violence’ (Nilan et al., 2014: 72) and the ability to control it. This type of self-control continues to be regarded as exemplary male behaviour throughout much of insular South East Asia (Brenner, 1995; Nilan et al., 2007; Peletz, 1996).

7. At the summit of Indonesia’s independence war, anti-colonial freedom fighters – who labelled themselves as pemoeda (‘youngsters’) – typically embodied a kasar type of masculinity inspired in part by Western cowboy archetypes (Frederick, 1997; Gouda, 2007a: 76–77; Nilan et al., 2011: 472). See Elmhirst (2007) and Nilan (2009) on contemporary Indonesian imageries of kasar men as icons of both fear and respect.

8. By the late 19th century, an indigenous counter-discourse was found in Islam, in which Indonesian men could be masculine, religious, and modern at the same time (van Dijk, 1997; Kloos, 2013). See DeLapp (2011) for a discussion on the classical Greek roots of the orientalist discourse on the ‘effeminate’ non-European.

9. These three themes also surface in scholarship on other geographical settings, e.g. Duggan (2001) on the US.

10. This type of masculinity is known in present-day Indonesia and jagoisme or jagoanisme.

11. I do not have the space to explore the theoretical hinterland of ‘modernity’ and its numerous overlapping subcategories, which include ‘postmodernity’, ‘alternative modernities’, ‘late modernity’, ‘second modernity’, ‘radicalized modernity’, ‘high modernity’, and ‘the contemporary’ (Barker et al., 2013: 12), but see Luttikhuis (2014) and Schulte Nordholt (2011) for a discussion on modernity in the Netherlands Indies.

12. Spiritual power (ilmu) in colonial Java was by no means confined to one gender (van Till, 2011: 94). However, see Smith (2012) for a study of gender-specific spiritual power in contemporary Lombok.

13. In classical or poetic Malay, tuan could also be applied to women of high status, but this usage is relatively rare in Sino-Malay texts. The word is still used in the sense of ‘Sir’ in Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei.

14. Reflecting hó-hàn (好漢). This term is translated as ‘good fellow’ by Louie (2002: 79–83), who discusses the socio-cultural development of this male archetype in China.

15. Respectively from siàng-kong (相公) – which currently denotes a ‘male prostitute’ – and kun-cú (君子). One novel juxtaposes the terms kungtju-hiap-teng – i.e. Hokkien kun-cú-hiáp-tēng (君子協定) – persetujuan djantan and ‘gentlemen [sic!] agreement’ as synonyms (Gan, 1961: 58).

16. Reflecting Hokkien ài-kok (愛國), ài-chiòng (愛眾), jiát-sim (熱心), ū-hàu (有孝), ū-chêng (有情), and tiong-sìn (忠信).

17. From Hokkien Kek-bēng (革命).

18. Known in Hokkien as Hong Kang lí-hiáp (荒江女俠).

19. Reflecting ko-ko (哥哥), hū-chhin (父親), and tāi-tiāng-hu (大丈夫).

20. From Hokkien bú-hiáp (武俠), which is more widely known under its Mandarin transliteration wǔxiá.

21. This word is derived from Hokkien kûn-thâu (拳道), which may be loosely translated as ‘the way of the fist’. Incidentally, the Chinese characters also form the last two elements of the Korean martial art taekwondo (跆拳道) as well as Bruce Lee’s famous fighting system Jeet Kune Do (截拳道).

22. These are Hokkien terms, i.e. hiáp (俠), peng-chú (兵主), kiàm-khek (劍客), chhin-teng (親丁), and chú-kong (主公). Interestingly, the modern Indonesian slang word taikong ‘thug’, reflecting Hokkien thài-kong (太公), is not attested in the Sino-Malay literature.

23. See also Chakraborty (2011), who examines the role of kṣatriya archetypes in the construction of Hindu masculinities in contemporary India.

24. See Hoogervorst (2015). In classical Malay texts, such as the Hikayat Raja Pasai (Jones, 1987) and Hikayat Aceh (Iskandar, 1958), pendekar is often mentioned in one breath with Keling ‘South Indian’. At present, the term chiefly refers to a silat master (Maryono, 1998).

25. As such, the Javanese jago covers a similar semantic niche as the nakleng archetype in Thai culture (Chaloemtiarana, 2007; Johnston, 1980; Keyes, 1986; Ockey, 2004; Reynolds, 2011).

26. This term goes back to the (archaic) Dutch word vrijman (‘freeman’), which denoted a man unburdened by commitments and obligations.

27. From Hokkien kan-sîn (奸臣).

28. For instance, in February 2014 the White House jokingly tweeted a photo of Barack Obama playing football with his dog, punning that the president had gone ‘beast mode’. As a result, Obama was widely attacked by some conservative media, who saw in the tweet a reason to impugn his proficiency in sports and, therefore, his masculinity.

29. Malam (2008) illustrates the legacy of these persistent stereotypes in the context of encounters between Thai males and western tourists.

30. Illustratively, photographs from the late-colonial period often depict Dutch administrators arm-in-arm with indigenous leaders, conveying the impression of a marriage (Gouda, 2007b).

31. A notable exception is Raja Ali Haji’s monolingual Malay dictionary, compiled in the mid-19th century, which contains elaborations on sex and drugs. This work hails from a literary tradition quite different from the Sino-Malay texts discussed in this paper, but see van der Putten (2002) for a compelling case study.

32. From Hokkien su-hian (私軒). The less reverent term pondok soendel ‘whorehouse’ is also attested. The Chinese-run brothels in the Netherlands Indies have rarely been subjected to detailed study. For comparative research, see Khor and Khoo (2004) on brothels in Penang, Firpo (2016) on the black market sex industry in colonial Vietnam, and Tagliacozzo (2008) on the history of prostitution in 20th-century Southeast Asia.

33. From Hokkien bâ-thâu (媌頭).

34. Respectively from Hokkien cha-bó· (查某) and má-káu-pô (馬狗婆).

35. In terms of the topics covered, the book shows striking similarities with the Burmese work A Married Man’s Guide (1931) by P. Monin (Ikeya, 2014b), reflecting, perhaps, the emergence of a broader public debate on sexuality among the modernizing indigenous middle-class of colonial South East Asia.

36. From Hokkien bōng-siat (夢泄), kam-chhng (疳瘡), sōaiⁿ-á (檨仔), and thian-phàu (天抱).

37. Along similar lines, Chie Ikeya (2014b, 2014c: 111–113) calls attention to advertisements for pleasure enhancement drugs in colonial Burma. Also see Whittaker (2001) on their use in contemporary Thailand.

38. From Hokkien chòng-iâng (壯陽). The contemporary Javanese word congyang, denoting an alcoholic beverage traditionally produced and consumed in the city of Semarang, appears to go back to the same source.

39. From Hokkien tó-iâng (倒陽).

40. This is probably a sexual pun; taihō (大砲) is the Japanese word for ‘cannon’.

41. From Hokkien thài-kàm (太監).

42. The same argument has been made in reference to the Philippines (Reyes, 2008) and Sri Lanka (Wickramasinghe, 2014), among others. Homi Bhabha (1994) famously refers to the practice of imitating the manners of the colonizers as ‘mimicry’. Kees van Dijk (1997: 62) takes this point one step further and argues that Indonesian nationalists wore European cloths as an act of ‘defiance towards the Dutch and the rules of dress they wanted to impose’.

43. From Hokkien ló-chiú (老酒).

44. From Hokkien pék-tài (白帶).

45. Illustratively, the company Gudang Garam has in the past used the slogans Pria punya selera (‘A man has taste’ or ‘The taste of men’), Kreteknya lelaki (‘The kretek of men’), Taklukkan tantanganmu (‘Conquer your challenges’), Kopiku kental, musikku keras, rokokku mantap (‘My coffee is strong, my music is hard, my cigarette is solid’), and Selera pemberani (‘The taste of daredevils’).

46. Advertisements depicting cigarette-smoking women existed but were rare. Female smokers also occur in a small number of translated Sino-Malay works. See, for example, the novel Lu-lu (Liem, 1933: 71), a translation of Mǎ Guóliàng’s Chinese original Lù-lù (露露).

47. This point was also made by Pante (2014) in the context of Manila. In a similar vein, Granqvist (2004) provides a detailed study of ‘motorized’ masculinities in post-colonial Nairobi.