Do Not Harm the Decorum”: Mixed Courts and Cloth in Colonial Indonesia
Keywords:
Landraad Colonial Indonesia Material culture of law Textiles and cloth Legal pluralism Colonial courtsAbstract
AbstractIn this article four photographs of mixed law courts (landraad) in nineteenth-century colonial Indonesia are approached as a window to study the materiality and meaning of cloth in courtrooms. The photos grant access to a careful colonial curation as well as complex Javanese hierarchies that were translated onto and through cloth, and its colors and patterns. Batik sarongs, tablecloths, head scarves, robes and gowns, coats and turbans reveal a courtroom of semiotic richness and plurality where different actors were signaling different messages to multiple audiences. This emphasis on cloth contributes to an emergent and rich discussion on the importance of objects in the study of law and empire, that has primarily focused on the materiality of paper and other objects of lawmaking. In the mixed court of the landraad, it was cloth that spoke louder than words and paper. This article emphasizes that in a mixed court the display of a plural world and jurisdictional layering, complicating the binary between direct and indirect colonial rule, was more important than a monolithic reflection of state law. Cloth was crucial to the display of this plural world and used as a way to impose, maintain, alter, insert oneself in or resist colonial rule.
References
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John Hazard, “Furniture Arrangement as a Symbol of Judicial Roles,” A Review of General Semantics 1 (1962): 181–88.
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Laura F. Edwards, Only the Clothes on her Back. Clothing & the Hidden History of Power in the 19th-Century United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 3–6.
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See for example: Pratiksha Baxi, “Introduction: Picturing Sociological Scenes – Social Life of Law in India,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 53 (2019): 4.
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Some exemplary works include: Bhavani Raman, Document Raj. Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Paul Halliday, “Authority in the Archives,” Critical Analysis of Law 1 (2014): 110–42; and Bianca Premo and Yanna Yannakakis, “A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond,” The American Historical Review 124 (2019): 28–55.
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This was Walter Woodbury, who moved back to London in 1863. After that, his brother, Albert Woodbury, joined the business in 1864: Newton, “Silver Streams,” 21; and Steven Wachlin, Woodbury & Page: Photographers Java (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994).
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Ibid.
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C.W. Wormser, Drie en dertig jaren op Java. Deel 1: In de rechterlijke macht (Amsterdam: W. ten Have, 1941), 35. Green tables in European law courts were a widespread phenomenon, from the fifteenth-century Court of Common Pleas in England, to the sovereign councils in the French empire, to early twentieth-century township courts in Russia and present-day law courts in Poland. I thank Jane Burbank, Michael Gauvreau, Nancy Christie, Lukasz Korporowicz, and David J. Seipp for sharing this information during the Law and History Review conference in 2020.
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Henk Schulte Nordholt, “Introduction,” in Outward Appearances. Dressing the State & Society in Indonesia, ed. Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology Press, 1997), 1–37; Arnout van der Meer, Performing Power: Cultural Hegemony, Identity, and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021), 20.
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From the twelfth century onwards, green has been a unifying color across the Islamic world, being associated with paradise, resurrection, and the Prophet Muhammad: Michel Pastoureau, Green: The History of a Color (transl. by Jody Glodding, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 49.
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Heather A. Sutherland, The Making of a Bureaucratic Elite: The Colonial Transformation of the Javanese Priyayi (Singapore: Heinemann, 1979).
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Colonial legislation in 1859 (Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, Algemene Sekretarie, Exh. Geheim 6-7-1859-Y1) decided that only pilgrims who had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca were allowed to wear Arab garments such as a turban: Kees van Dijk, “Sarong, Jubbah, and Trousers. Appearance as a Means of Distinction and Discrimination,” in Outward Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia, ed. Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997), 58, fn. 8.
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Pierre van der Eng, “Why Didn't Colonial Indonesia have a Competitive Cotton Textile Industry?” Modern Asian Studies 47 (2013):1019–54.
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Alit Djajasoebrata, Flowers of the Universe: Textiles of Java (Amsterdam: LM Publishers, 2018), 28–29, 79.
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Ibid., 26–28, 49. Kain simbut was still present in Western Java in the early twentieth century at the village level, however. The priyayi Djajadiningrat family also owned kain simbut heirlooms: Rens Heringa, “Upland Tribe, Coastal Village, and Inland Court: Revised Parameters for Batik Research,” in Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles, ed. Ruth Barnes and Mary Kahlenberg (New York: Delmonico Books, 2010), 126–27, 132.
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Noor, “Everything in its Place,” 40.
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Personal communication with Alit Djajasoebrata (December 10, 2019).
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Noor, “Everything in its Place,” 40.
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Noor, “Everything in its Place,” 39.
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Covering the breast was influenced both by Islamic and European ways of dressing: Kees van Dijk, “Sarong, Jubbah, and Trousers. Appearance as a Means of Distinction and Discrimination,” in Outward Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia, ed. Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997), 51.
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Bijblad op het Staatsblad van Nederlandsch-Indië (1870), no.2308: “Bepalingen omtrent de kostumes van Inlandsche hoofden en ambtenaren.”
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Augusta de Wit, De Godin Die Wacht, 1903. Reissue and introduction by Tessel Pollmann (Schoorl: Conserve, 1989), 79.
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Personal communication with Mirjam Shatanawi, Research Associate at the National Museum of World Cultures (August 26, 2020).
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Wahyono Martowikrido. Lurik: sejarah, fungsi, dan artinya bagi masyarakat (Jakarta: Proyek Pembinaan Museum Nasional, 1994), 57–59; Rens Heringa, “Upland Tribe, Coastal Village, and Inland Court: Revised Parameters for Batik Research,” in Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles, ed. Ruth Barnes and Mary Kahlenberg (New York: Delmonico Books, 2010), 125–26; and Djajasoebrata, Flowers from the Universe, 99.
40
The practice of dressing prisoners in vertical stripes was especially common in the United States, and in certain British and German prisons as well as in a number of penal colonies: Pastoureau, Michel, The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 55–56Google Scholar.
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Pamela Pattynama, “Interracial Unions and the Ethical Policy. The Representation of the Everyday in Indo-European Family Photo Albums,” in Photography, Modernity and the Governed in Late-Colonial Indonesia, 133–62.
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Charles Philippe du Cloux, De Verantwoordelijkheid van Herbergiers En Logementhouders Voor de Goederen Der Bij Hen Logeerende Reizigers: Art. 1746-1748 B.W (PhD diss., Utrecht University, 1881).
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See for example: Boekhoudt, W., “Een afscheidsgroet aan de jongeren onder mijne oud-collega's,” Indisch Tijdschrift van het Recht 107 (1915): 317–52Google Scholar.
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Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, Algemene Secretarie, Besluit February 16, 1920, no.67. In 1909 it had been decided to allow Javanese officials to wear the white European costume except during court sessions of the landraad during which the old (in 1870 modified and modernized with a black jacket) traditional costume had to be worn: Bijblad op het Staatsblad van Nederlandsch-Indië (1909), no.6973: “Aanvulling der bepalingen omtrent de kostumes van Indische hoofden en amtenaren.” The emphasis on each ethnic group wearing their own costume dated back to regulations of the Dutch East India Company (VOC, Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) in the seventeenth century: van Dijk, “Sarong, Jubbah, and Trousers,” 45.
