Literature and Politics

In the 1920s and 1930s, the young Indonesian revolutionary Sukarno unified the fragmented nationalist cause in the name of Merdeka (freedom). Drawing on the ‘truths’ of a state existing prior to Dutch colonisation, his speeches and pamphlets fused the competing desires of Nationalists, Communists and Islamists into a ‘common struggle’ for Independence. In style and content, Sukarno wove his syncretic philosophies into a set of key doctrines that not only delivered Indonesia independence from the Dutch but became the foundational doctrines of the State. Sukarno’s syncretic philosophies drew on power, class, ideology, identity, ethnicity, religion and anti-imperialism to ‘imagine’ a post-colonial state. Linguistically reliant upon ethnography, spiritualism, dogma and metaphors of agency, Sukarno wove emotion and rhetoric into a powerful narrative of freedom. Addressing elites and masses, Muslims and Marxists, Sukarno not only unified Indonesians but legitimised Indonesian Nationalism.

Specific consideration is given to Sukarno’s pre-independence texts, ‘Nationalism, Marxism and Islam’ (1926) and ‘Marhaen’ (1934) and his iconic Independence text, ‘The Birth of Pancasila’ (1945). Each demonstrates Sukarno’s early development of indigenous syncretism and its reliance on Javanese-derived belief systems. They reveal Sukarno’s early discursive ordering of Indonesian political culture. The texts functioned independently and in unison to establish a regime of truth about the nationalist struggle, its membership, leadership and outcomes. As a set of texts they functioned discursively to ‘imagine’ the existence of an Indonesian nation, the emergence of an Indonesian citizen and the ‘birth’ of a national ideology. These three discourses would order Sukarno’s regulation and control of Indonesian society until his fall from power in the 1960s. Pancasila was the legacy Sukarno left Suharto to build his own hegemony lasting another three decades. Central in each text was the discursive transformation of Indonesian Merdeka.