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In the Netherlands East Indies, irrigation technology played a pivotal role in the development of the colony, including the development of local populations. In 1916, the colonial agricultural extension service looked to the waduk, an open water tank irrigation technology based on local indigenous precedents, to help it cope with problems of water distribution in eastern and central Java. The service hoped this technology would resolve the increasingly serious disputes between indigenous farmers and European sugar planters. Farmers and the investigating engineers claimed that European sugar planters got too much of the available irrigation water, harming local crops,while sugar planters argued that sugar would enhance local economic development better than farmers' traditional rice crops. Despite the engineers' hopes that waduks would help indigenous farmers without reducing the water available to the lucrative sugar plantations, the waduks did not prove to be particularly effective at resolving the inequities of water distribution. A few years later, both colonial administrators and the farmers in the sugar regions abandoned this technology, and little was heard of it again. Nearly a century later, however, in western Java, despite having no history of waduk use or water conflicts like those outlined above, local farmers have recently introduced these water tanks as an aid to water distribution. What is more, they claim the waduk as a local technological tradition of colonial origin, where the colonial pedigree is cited as proof of the technology's ability to produce a fair distribution of water. The farmers of western Java have created a romantic fantasy of the waduk's past where no physical continuity of technology or practice exists. This article examines the technological romanticization of the waduk in western Java, and it explores the reasons why local farmers have re-appropriated both this technology and the colonial past to re-imagine a technological tradition.
Both colonial officials of the past and present-day farmers have been influenced in their choice of this technology by their romantic ideals about its past: Dutch colonial officials saw the waduk as a "traditional" technology that was both appropriate and effective, while for contemporary Indonesians, the "colonial" technology embodies fairness because it is from"the good old days" when things, they imagine, were just and stable. Traditional technologies may in fact be invented traditions and...