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State control of artistic expression was by no means total in Indonesia during the 1965-98 New Order regime of former President Soeharto. As is well known, the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer was imprisoned on Buru Island during many years of this period. The central government's conceptualization of the nation's "ethnic arts" as tourist trinkets was, admittedly, as heavy-handed as it was vacuous. Witness the government's construction of Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, Beautiful Indonesia-in-Miniature Theme Park. This park was located on the outskirts of Jakarta for visits by travelers and Indonesian citizens who might want to see hundreds of Indonesian cultures in quick-step, Disneyland fashion. Yet everyday discourse was not effectively censored by the state. Near the end of the Soeharto family's reign, in many parts of the country, political grumbling was rife from taxicabs to coffee shops. In Indonesia's print culture, press censorship of the weekly magazines Tempo and Detik was severe. Yet popular fiction was, in important ways, uncontrollable. During these years, book publishing in the Indonesian language was so gargantuan (or amoebic, so to speak, given the multitude of short-lived but energetic small presses ebbing and flowing across the public culture) that seditious texts could appear, sometimes to acclaim. A crucially important example of this is Father Y. B. Mangunwijaya's remarkable 1991 novel, Durga/Umayi , translated here for the first time into English by anthropologist Ward Keeler.
This volume includes Keeler's useful introductory essay on the ties that Durga/Umayi has to Javanese shadow puppet plays, an animating force in the novel. Keeler also delineates Durga/Umayi 's connections to Indonesian language history and language play and to Indonesian political history since the 1930s. Keeler offers translation...