Transcript for:
Insights from Peter Carey's Journey

What is this great business of life and death? Yeah? That's what we've got to solve. It's not enough to become really super -duper clever. It's not enough to become super -duper astute, Machiavellian, as a politician. You're going to die unfulfilled. You've got to know, here we are. We've got this incredible experience of being alive in the world. But being alive in the world just doesn't mean it's not just a one -way street. You've got lots and lots of different pathways, and lots of different ways of actually maman farkan to have a mise -en -valer of this life as a human being. And what Java offered me was a mise -en -valer of that life, which I would not have got if I had just stayed in the Zola Nyaman of the intellect. you Good morning, Dr. Peter Carey, thank you for Grazing Chronicles and I would like to introduce you for a start. You are now in Oxford University Trinity College as an emeritus fellow and you were an adjunct professor at Universitas Indonesia up until 2023. You are a writer, very prolific one. I've read many of your publications, not just the books, but also the other publications. And I'm very fascinated to be able to talk to you today and we're going to discuss a little bit about identity, about Indonesian post -colonial projection. But I would like to begin with history, the making of Peter Carey. I will address you as Papi if I may. Oh, wonderful, wonderful. You first set out to Tanjum Priyop. in 1970. Cash strapped in a cargo ship and as a curious young man. That's a long time ago. And then the second time you come to Indonesia was in 1971. October, yeah. Yes, as a graduate student. And then you came several times again and the last in 2008. A bit over 30 years from the first time you came to Indonesia after many more times that you visited. And this time more like a pilgrim for lack of a better term. So was the food in the UK that bad? Well I had a very good friend who was actually a German Jewish refugee from Königsberg and he said that when he arrived in England in the 1930s pepper was a luxury. And really starting in Brighton, delicatessen shops, which many of his friends who are Czech Germans from the Sudetenland Jews founded, you know, began to, yeah, civilize the UK, but before that it was towed in the hole and staking kidney pudding. I see. I see. All right. I have yet to try the jelly eels. Yeah. And I think that Sukkur Alhamdulillah, we didn't have the English here in Indonesia. You had the Dutch and basically they left behind a much more varied culinary legacy. Yeah. I'm fascinated partly because I spent a lot of hours last night reading your manuscript of your soon to be published memorabilia. Yeah. Kind of a spiritual journey that you put in that manuscript. And there you mentioned a lot about your relationship with Indonesia, not only in a scholarly context, but in a spiritual context. I'm very curious if you can account for us here today, your recollections of your first interactions with Indonesia. Yeah. Well, obviously I'm a colonial child. I mean, when I was born in Burma in 1948, the year it got its independence. My father was born in Liverpool, but he sailed down the Mersey age 21 to open a branch of his, he didn't own it. It was a sort of small family firm working out of Manchester. Fairweather Richards in Rangoon import export. And obviously Burma at that time was a big exporter of rice, two and a half million tons of rice, the biggest exporter in the world. So he made his life in Burma. And my mother was born and brought up in Shanghai. Her father had gone out during the Boxer Rebellion. I don't know. He was probably a representative of Schlesinger's or, you know, doing something. He was a sort of. a curious Walter Mitty character who disappeared during the Second World War. And I know from the Terry Laakai's in Somerset House that he lived until 1958 and he died in the UK, but I never met him. And then my father and my mother were brought together by the tides of war in Quetta in a place not a million miles like this in Central at the Staff College in Quetta, because my mother had evacuated from Hong Kong. Her husband, first husband, had been killed by the Japanese. He was Cassie Dua, Kapala, sexy Intel Dua in Hong Kong. And my father had walked out of Burma when the Japanese attacked and he'd walked from Yellenjiang where the oil fields were, he witnessed their destruction. And he came to Camilla in Bangladesh, which was about 750 kilometres. And he never really recovered from that because he got tropical malaria. Yeah. So he was seconded. to become a staff officer. And he met my mother who was the librarian of the staff college at Quetta. Okay. So they then rebuilt their life after the war in Burma, where I was born. My elder brother was born in Simla and my elder sister was born from my mother's first husband in Beijing. I see. And you immigrated to the UK when you were seven years old. Seven, yeah, in 1955. The writing was already on the wall in Burma. And there was a coup in 1962. If we stayed until the coup, we would have got out with just the clothes on our backs. I see. But with such an international upbringing and household, when the first idea emerged within you, and I don't know whether you communicated that with your parents about Indonesia, how was it? How did they react? Well, it came about actually quite, as a French say, a lampraviste. You know, you didn't actually schedule it. It wasn't scripted. It came off the left field very unexpectedly. And it came off the left field. Obviously, I had a background in Burma, but then I had 14 years in the English schooling system. And then I graduated in Oxford in 1969, June. And I had in my pocket, a English speaking union scholarship to go to Cornell in the United States. Yes. And I wasn't... I think I explained in my memoir, which was Yung Gaid and Yung Kassat Mata, the Memoirs of the Mystical in Java and Beyond, that the first sort of stirring of that came very late, actually, in my academic career in the UK, because I had to be interviewed. I had to have a viva interview, Lisan, here. Yeah, like an oral test. An oral test. Which is very unfair, because some people are very pide and other people are very shy. And I had a very bad stammer. So for me, it was... quite an ordeal to face this, when do you last see your father bored of inquisitors, you know, even questions that personal, even question such personal as when you last see your father. No, no, no. I was just saying that that was a very famous painting by a Victorian artist and it shows a young boy during the civil war being grilled by parliamentary commissioners about where his father's whereabouts were. OK. Yeah. So it's called When Did You Last See Your Father? And it's that sort of suasana of Meng Ancham, you know, sort of Makhmilub type situation. Yeah. So I was confronted with that. And my supervisor was a very genial, garrulous, brilliant, eccentric professor called Richard Cobb. And he dreamt slept and. basically lived a life in a second identity, which was French and France of the late 18th century and the revolution. So he invited me over a bit like we're sitting here to have a beer on the lawn of Balliol College and to consider what the questions might be, which would come up on the following day. Yeah. And we were sitting on the lawn. It was a June, late June evening, very pleasant. And who should heave over the lawn of Balliol but the Bight Professor of Commonwealth History, who was Jack Gallaho, who later went on to Cambridge to be a very much loved and rather tragically short lived master of Trinity College. And he was a historian. He was a historian who thought out of the box. He was not from your normal sort of privileged hunting, shooting, fishing sort of crowd. He was born and brought up in Liverpool and was educated by the Catholic brothers in Birkenhead. And he said to me, boom, you know, young man, I'm not telling tales out of school, but if you do well tomorrow, you can turn base metals into gold and turn what would be a solid second class degree into a first. And if you've got a first class honours degree, you would have the right to apply and to get an SSRC research scholarship, the Social Science Research Council scholarship from the government. And if if you decided to go down that path of research, which is open now to you, what would you choose as your research topic? And I said, well, actually, that's pretty easy for me because I had Richard Cobb as my supervisor of my B .A. a thesis and my special subject, which is on the French Revolution, I'm going to choose somewhere in France, maybe where I spent my gap year, which was in Grenoble, French Gante and that area, and look at the impact of the French Revolution at a regional level. Not at the center, but at the regions, which was the big noise at that time. And Jack Gallagher looked at me and said, well, it's a great subject, but padat, you know, it's quite an oversubscribed field now. And I wouldn't actually advise that, but why don't I just come back from the Hague where I've seen the papers of Marshall Dindles. Why don't you take Java as your laboratory? Why don't you look at the impact of the French Revolution overseas, which was real? In Java, you had a Napoleonic Marshall. He was. not French, but Dutch and Willem Dindels, who laid the foundations of the modern colonial state. Why don't you look at Java for this, you know, regional impact to the French Revolution? So that was a eureka moment for me. It was, you know, if I wrote a novel and said, well, the sort of hero, anti -hero of that novel had someone heaving himself over Belial lawn and saying that you'd say, well, that's completely far fetched. So at that time, there wasn't many people studying Napoleonic Wars effect. No, no, it was it was Jack Galah's idea. I don't know where he got it from. I don't know whether he knew I'd spent a long time in Burma and grown up in Burma. I was sort of a colonial child. Maybe Richard told him. But anyway, that was what he told me. And in fact, it was there was a synergy there because between what Jack was reflecting on and what I had in my pocket as an English speaking union scholar to Cornell, you know, I was about to go to the Fonset or Ego of Indonesian studies in the United States, which George Kain, who was a journalist, who'd covered the second Dutch police action, who's a landlord. Iman Pamojo eventually actually got me passage to Indonesia on the Jakarta boat. He'd covered the clash Godua, you know, and he'd come back and he'd use the federal funding for rare and endangered languages to get federal funding for Cornell's modern Indonesia project, which was part and parcel of the Southeast Asia program at Cornell in the 1950s at a time when obviously the U .S. was being drawn into the Vietnam War. Yeah, Kain was very outspoken against the war, as was Ben -Anh Nguyen. Madison, but I landed it, you know, in Upper State New York in this very remote, a bit like where we are today, a remote environment to find all the bells and whistles of a very extensive and very well provided and well resourced program on Indonesia, modern Indonesia, with lots and lots of books in Olin Library, with the John Eccles collection of books on Indonesia, the training in Indonesia and the training in Dutch, the training in Javanese. So, you know, it was suddenly you stumbled on Aladdin's den, you know, of resources on Indonesia. And when I said to George Koehn and to Ben Anderson and to Oliver Walters, well, I'm thinking of doing a thesis on the colonial, colonial history. Their reply to me was, well, that's not really what we do here. Yeah, what we do is history from the grassroots, Dariakarunput. So go away and learn Dutch, which is obviously the Kunshi, the open sesame for the archives, learn Indonesian by Sunanesia, and then come back to us and say, well, what do you want to do? And we know then if you master the languages of the research languages, you're not going to write your thesis from the GLADAK KAPAL, from the deck of a trading ship or the veranda of a counting house. So that's what I did. And I went and I thought, you know, I sort of psyched myself to be able to understand Dutch by remembering Middle English of Chaucer and the smattering of German I had, which I did for my O -level in German, which I failed. And then I went into Olin Library and Ben Anderson lent me his book on the Hasidnes van Andanezio of Dochraff. So I read a page a day and I used a dictionary and then I began to graduate to a chapter a day or a chapter, you know, over a couple of days. And then one day my eye fell on this print in the early 19th century, in the late 18th century. Staff officers had to be a trained artist because there was no camera. Yeah, there was no cameras. They had to be able to report back to their commanding officers. What do you see in terms of the Medan Pran? So they were trained as skilled and very, you know, chakat, very quick on the draw artists. Yeah, aqua lists. Yeah, or even to paint from memory. Yeah, to paint from memory. Yeah, or to sketch from memory. And Dostoevs, who is the son -in -law of the Panglima, a Dachok. had this gift of being an extremely adept field artist, and he'd done a series of prints of the Java War, one of which was Diponogoro entering the prepared encampment in the island, in the Progo River, which was prepared for him during the three weeks of the negotiation, which ended Sichara -Pengianat with Ariraya Ildefitri of 1828, 1830, 28th of March, Sunday, with his arrest and then his penasing and his exile to Sulawesi. So I saw this figure on horseback, surrounded by his lance -bearing bodyguard, and I had a, what you could term, well, only the Javanese and the Indonesians have the right term, because it's not in the English language, a contact button. Dari Nalori Saya, Kepada Nalori Diponogoro, a certain contact gibe, something you couldn't script. The first script was Jagalaha, talking about Java. The second was this contact gibe with Diponogoro and a feeling, well, gosh, this mysterious figure on horseback, you can't see his face because he's covered with his turban. Is someone I'd like to find out more about? So instead of dindles, I'm going to do Diponogoro. They both begin with D. So Diponogoro became what I began to sort of concentrate on. And if you look at the hilltop in Central, in this tiny planet, which is whizzing through space at 800 kilometers a second. So by the time we've had this two hour conversation, we've been to the moon and back several times. So we're living, as Jiddu Krishnamurti said, an immensity, but we turn it into a petty little affair. In fact, if we really knew where we were, you'd realize that you're living an incredible journey, which is not just about the sort of just money, but we're living on all sorts of different levels all at once. And all these levels are interpenetrating. Yeah. We've got different levels of karma. I come here, I come at the right time. So I've got good karma with this interview, but then I have a family behind me. So I have the karmic family and then I have my, where I live in Serpong or my community. And then I'm living in Indonesia and Indonesia has gone through 65 and it's gone through 98. I mean, those sorts of things wouldn't happen in Nottingham. have those, Nagara has accumulated karma, you know, and then we're living in the Shmitata of a particular era in world history, with the South China Sea and with global warming, with Israel in Gaza, with Russia in Ukraine, all sorts of, you know, this is the reality. My father's reality was walking out of Burma, 750 kilometers to Camilla in Bangladesh. I had no uncles because they were all dead from the war. But, you know, there was the proximate karma of that era in which they'd lived. Yeah, I share that with you deeply, because there are many instances where I would imagine you must have felt that it is all meant to be. Yeah, I mean, I had three Eureka moments. One Eureka moment was on the lawn in Bediel, second Eureka moment was in Olin Library, and the third Eureka moment was in the dock in New Orleans, because I went to New Orleans on the early February. to participate in Mardi Gras as a sort of, yeah, I hitched a lift down to New Orleans or flew into Delta Airways and hitched a lift back. And yeah, I decided to go and look at the Mississippi paddle steamers. Um, couldn't afford to go on a Mississippi paddle steamer, but I was on the dock and I saw it written in these huge letters, Jakarta Lloyd. And I thought, gosh, that's interesting. Here I am, you know, I've been in university for four years now. This is my graduate year, first graduate year, and I'm supposed to be studying Indonesia and I've never been to Indonesia. You know, it's all been armchair, um, you know, pipe dreams, uh, through reading books and hearing lectures and being in seminars. Why don't I take a Jakarta Lloyd boat to Indonesia, you know, um, do a Lloyd gym, Lord gym, um, um, uh, sort of Conrad. And then I, I came back to Cornell and there, there was another signage here because George Kain said, well, Kabatulan, uh, funny, you should say that, but, but my landlord in Georgia, we were all arrested by Colonel Van Langen and the paratroops together in Kotobaru was Imam Pamocho, and he is a Jakarta Lloyd agent in New York. So you go and see him. I'll write a note to him. And he said, well, yeah, I mean, I'll arrange for you pay $50, which is about $450 in today's money for your, your fair and your, your travel, and I'll get you onto a Jakarta Lloyd boat, which left from Staten Island, the Samratulangi, which had been built for Bunkar no by Khrushchev, uh, it's the Stettin, uh, new Sichin, um, shipyard. Yeah. Which later, obviously, that was in 19. Well, the boat being built or when you set out, well, well, let's not go there yet. Eventually then you went aboard that ship. I went down to New Orleans and then I boarded the ship in May, late May, in New York, about the 28th of May. I've in fact just met a samratulangi whose two aunts were daughters of samratulangi. So I met her. She was manning the Cordon Bleu desk at an education fair two weeks ago. So I gave her my diary and they said, my aunts are overjoyed. The ship actually sailed to New York. So I was able to go on a cargo ship. It was Laut La Pass and there was the ship. So I couldn't use English. Everybody spoke. There was a nachoda from Minang Kabbal. There was a first. officer from Ambon, and there was the chief engineer, it was Javanese. And it was like a sort of floating mini Indonesia, yeah? Tamman mini Indonesia. You had all represented. You had Batak, who sung lusty hymns on Sundays. Everybody was represented on this ship. So it was a sort of introduction to a culinary introduction and a sort of linguistic introduction and a a blick in the Yavansa summon waving, a little look into the Javanese social world of living together. And I lived on the ship for six weeks. It sailed around the Cape. It went up to Jeddah in the Persian in the Red Sea. It took, it was taking 6 ,000 tons of American grain to Saudi. And then it came back through the Lakshadweep to Engarno and then entered the Sunda Strait. And when we entered the Sunda Strait, there was a telex from Priyak saying, don't come to Priyak, introduction, because I actually had a sense of this very extensive travel to Indonesia. And then it was like something from Greek mythology, because here I was on a ship bearing 6 ,000 tons of grain. It was like Persephone, Demeter, and the Lord of Hades. So you had to descend into the underworld in order to be able to uprise again. And it was also like sort of the Ellucian mysteries. You almost had to die. I'll. had to die to get to Indonesia, because the first Injakkakili Talukpatung, which is now Vandalampung, the second mate who was Sundanese, I taught French on board and he said, I'm going to give you a really nice lunch at the local Chinese restaurant. So we had this blowout lunch and then afterwards I felt really queasy and went to the, we had a mystery, not a doctor, who had been parachuted into West Iran for the mandala campaign. And he said, oh, well, Peter, you've been overeating. I'll give you a laxative. And in fact, I hadn't been overeating because I'd been extremely greedy on board. I'd eaten what is known in English as jaggery, which is gula jawa dengan kacang, which is a sort of sweet meat. And that I got stuck in my appendix and immediately gave me a laxative. My appendix burst. And we were in the. middle of the Musi River, waiting to load and cut it rubber, and it was excruciating. I was on board and they pumped me up with morphine. I got on what is known as a Catec, a little lighter, little boat, and we danced across the water to the shoreline where there were three board and immigration officials eating their lunch off down Pisang. So they ushered me into Palumbang, and then I was operated at the Caritas Hospital, which is a Catholic hospital in Palumbang, and the surgeon obviously did what he needed to do, and he saved my life at that time. The problem was he was a lone surgeon. Dutch graduated, but he had 60 patients and he didn't come in every day because he had a heart condition, so I was sort of sewn back up again and I developed acute peritonitis and my face became green. And I was reading at that time, Catch -22. Catch -22, yes, yeah, it's a term in English also. Catch -22, which is a wartime novel about the absurdities and the ironies and the tragedies of war. And Catch -22, Joseph Heller's book, he didn't fight in the war, but he interviewed all these people. You know, every page was a laugh, but I couldn't laugh because I was in agony. And then I had someone who was a sort of a deus ex machina, someone who came like Samar, one of the gods in the Wayang, and he appeared and he was my not my roommate. I looked over. in this sort of tenement into the next, um, Asrama in Ithaca. And there he was Simon Head, who was writing his script, see on the Confrontasi. And he'd come to do his script, see, and he'd abandon it because he wasn't being given the time of day, but Ali more topo by, uh, any of the generals, Moka Ginter and others. And he became financial correspondent, uh, for the, um, financial times, you know, um, and he was waiting for me at Priok. And when I didn't emerge at Priok, he asked the crew of Samratulangi, well, where is this guy? And they said, oh, where we left him in, um, Palambang, uh, characters and out of his own pocket, he flew up on Malpati to Palambang to see how I was. And he said, every day you got worse. So I knew we had to sort of pull the levers. Um, and here you see, I'm sure it works here in a different way, but, uh, England, Britain is a very class ridden society. How I Ming edge, I can, um, Basa ingress, how I actually speak, what sort of accent I have, what shoes I wear, what type of clothes, uh, how I cut my hair, et cetera, et cetera, all this within a split second. You as an Englishman are going to size me up and say, well, this person comes from here, if you go to the channel islands, they will know all the various levels of your, um, Locket, uh, Locket, uh, Basa ingress. Yeah, exactly. You, you should speak Queens, English. Yeah. So he was from the same. Cultural, uh, class background. Okay. And he used, he used that card to basically Trump, the British ambassador, uh, Haynesworth, um, who is in the Malacca's said, um, you know, visiting Maluku, um, but basically said to him via telephone, or he went to the embassy and they said, go and get lost. And they said, okay, if you let this man die in Palembang, then my father, who is the former high commissioner for Malaya and Nigeria, and is a friend of Alec Douglas home, who's the, now the foreign minister will ask a question in the house of Lords, Lord, Lord head. And that basically Trump's him. And he sent, he got his, um, military duty officer to send to get in touch with our, uh, the air vice -martial of the time, who then sent a telex, uh, to, um, uh, yeah, um, but to, to, uh, airport. military airport in Palumbang to give clearance for a New Zealand Air Force flight from Changi. At the time, you had no medical insurance. I had no medical insurance and basically I was the Islamarkan by Simon Head, by him going back and then getting a medivac, which was on the British government. Because they, well, the New Zealand government Wellington paid for it because it was a New Zealand Air Force plane, which came. And in the belly of the Bristol freighter, they had a truck, which they drove into the streets of Palumbang. They came to a carousel hospital. The doctor was very reluctant to release me. And then he was released. And then I got on board this Bristol freighter and I saw these flame trees going past the window on the runway at Talang Batutu. And I knew I was going to live. Yeah, but it was a bit like the sort of voyage of into Hades. Yeah, I spent this sort of three weeks in Hades, in Palambang, between life and death, Antara, Hidok, and Mati. And then I was sort of saved by the bell. So it was a very dramatic, it wasn't your normal, you know, sort of emirates flight to Valium or to wherever. Or not, to Thakkamata. And I came and it was sort of meant, this was, yeah, in Yaddas Suatu, Yang, Sudaditaktirkan, Dapiditaktirkan dalam arti bawatida mulus. Yeah, it doesn't mean just because you've got a life which has been, to some extent, you know, spoken for, doesn't mean it's going to be easy, all sorts of twists, all sorts of slips between the cup and the lip. And that was my experience of it. Yeah, but what's fascinating is that you being able to, you know, put the dots together and then find a pattern and some of that came much later. Yeah, basically, when you're on the brow of a wave, you're surfing, you're surfing your particular life course, it's actually quite difficult to stand back and say, this is how it is. I mean, the Buddha said you're going to go mad if you try and find out what people's karma is, because it's so ingevickled, it's so suru, it's so completely disrupt, you know, as I said at the beginning, you've got your personal karma, you've got your family karma, you've got your community karma, you've got the country you're living in, you've got the era you're living. It's not easy, you can't. it's not easy to be a clairvoyant and you can't say, well, this becomes this. Obviously, if I was late this morning, I would create a particular karma for this interview. But on the whole, it's it's not that easy to step back and link up all the dots and say, OK, well, I have this family. My past life Buddha could see 82000 past lives. I could only see one past life. And my past life was I lived in the 1930s in the interwar years. I died young and I died in the Bursi uptight. That was my sort of inkling of where my past life had been. I don't know whether I was an Indo. I don't know whether I was Dutch. I don't know whether I was Indonesian. But I have a very strong information of of that in in my sort of not in my upbringing that came much later. And it came when I was studying the Sumatra in in Jakarta. so so you had a near death really unpleasant experience during your first visit to Indonesia. And then you mentioned you came again to Samara. So what happened between those moments that made you want to come back? I didn't come to Samara. I was studying with the Sumara Kabatinang group. Yeah, I was eventually evacuated. I spent six weeks in RAF hospitals. I came back to Rorton in Wiltshire, which was then the Princess Alexandra Hospital for sick and wounded RAF personnel. And my father drove to Rorton the 94 miles from Surrey to pick me up. And yeah, on the way back, he said, Peter, let's stop at a pub and have a pub lunch. And I said, gosh, well, wonders never cease, you know, because this is the first proper meal I've had for, yeah, I was operated on the 14th of July, 1970. And I got out of the Rorton in late August, early September, came back to completely covered in open sores from all the injections for the antibiotics. And my father said, OK, we're going to stop at this pub. And we're going to have a pub lunch. Yeah. Great. I mean, I wasn't a vegetarian then. I am now a chondron, a kabata, you do. And I ordered a sirloin steak and we were sitting down, we were eating this pub lunch. And at the next door table, there was a family gathering. And in the middle of the lunch, it's a bit like now. The person at the next table, the sort of paterfamilias at the next table, the elder figure at the next table, got up from the lunch and died on the floor, he had a heart attack and he died on the floor of the pub. And that's not your normal experience. And not in a pub. Well, nowhere. I mean, I had that experience in Jakarta because I actually. he helped to get Bunkarni celebrated as a Paravan Nacional and Bunkarni's secretary met me in Kabairan at a hotel in Kabairan and he also had a heart. He was so excited by the fact that, you know, all this work had been done and his boss had been orbited as a Paravan Nacional, he survived the heart attack. But this man died on the floor. And within two weeks of that, or within two months of that happening, we came home. My father was also dead. He died of the same, you know, in the same very dramatic circumstances, not immediately, but he died of a sudden heart attack and it was almost as though great events cast their shadow before them. Yeah. So if you are awake, open, you can read the runes, you can say something is about to happen. I wouldn't go this way. I would go that way. But yeah, between taxes and death, you know, you can't bargain with death. You know, it's something which is Sudha Ditaktirkan. Although if you're the Buddha, you could bargain with death. And he said to Ananda, you know, if you'd asked, I could have postponed this, but you didn't ask. So between two saltries in Bihar, this is my Parinivana, you know. But, you know, it was a situation in which things didn't happen in your life. I came home, my mother became a widow. I then went back out again after spending nine months in in Leiden and studying Javanese and beginning my study of the Achaemeno -Rijksarkiv archives, and came then to Jakarta in 1971, October. And well, some interesting things happened. When I was in Jakarta, I stayed in Pasal Rumput and I stayed with a friend of mine, Budhi Prasadjo, who was an anthropologist who did his fieldworking, Gugasik Whetan, and was examined by Meli Tan. And his family worked for the Hotel Indonesia, and they lived in Pasal Rumput. So I lived in this campon with one of the managers of the Hotel Indonesia, and lived again, a bit like the Samaratulangi. It was a completely Indonesian world, obviously of not. At that time, did you speak already some Indonesian? Yeah, I mean, I was forced to speak Indonesian. It was a sort of baptism of fire. I was forced to speak Indonesian on the Samratulangi and I was forced to speak Indonesian when I came to live in Pasarumput in a one room a kampung house and then going every day to the archives. And then on the 8th of December, I just said, well, you know, it's great being in Jakarta, Alisadi Kin. It was still a big kampung, still had bechak. I went on a bechak down to Chalan Gajamada, Sarata Sablas, which was where the archives were. But then I decided I need to go to Jogja. Yeah, because before we go there, because you came back again to Indonesia after all these events and even the passing of your father. So that didn't deter you from coming back because you came across a very spiritual person and then that could have been a different sign to you. Right. This is like an extra set missile. I was sort of locked onto my target by then. Yeah. Okay. Um, basically, you know, I'd been knocked back by the near -death experience in Palumbang and everything that followed from that I'd lost, um, a lot of weight and I was a shadow of my former self. And basically I had to sort of recoup that over a year, but then it was clear, you know, I needed to go and do my field work here. I couldn't do that in lights where I couldn't do that in the Hague. I couldn't do it in London. I had to be here in Indonesia. And, um, so I came back, um, in October, I flew out on the cheapest flight for, uh, Karachi in what is now Pakistan. Yeah. Um, and then came to Halim, um, and met, uh, my friend from the, uh, Budhi Prasadjo, and he said, you come and live in the Passo Rumput and I lived in the Passo Rumput for three months. And yeah, I then began to, I met the editor of Kunti magazine, who was fluent in Javanese and he romanized a part of my thesis, which was the solo Babad Deepanagoro, solo version of the Babad Deepanagoro. And then on the 8th of 8th of December, I took the, uh, Senja Utama train from, um, yeah, Stasiun Senen or whatever it went from to, um, to Jogja, um, the Lempuyangan station. Um, and I got down from the train at Maghrib six o 'clock in the evening. Um, menjalung, sorry, menjalung, malung. And I knew a soul, you know, in this lifetime, I'd never been to Jogja. So I didn't know anybody in Jogja. I walked down Malia Boro and I. I went down a little Gung to the Lozmann Andanasia, which was not a million miles from the station and booked in. And this was also not scripted. I mean, I went into the Mundi and who should come out of the Kamara Mundi? It was a sort of block. But someone I'd met in Jakarta, who was a man called Philip, who was the head of UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund, like the people who were killed yesterday in Gaza, the seven seven helpers of the Kitchens for the World. And he was doing a project Gezi in Kunungidl for UNICEF. And he said, Peter, there you are. Come with me. We're going to go and look at a Waiheng Wang performance together. Waiheng Wang. Waiheng Wang. Yeah. And I said, OK, well, just give me time. I'll change and I'll get ready. Where is this wang wang? And he said. But we need to call a bechak. And we've got a bechak. I don't know if we went in two bechaks or just one bechak. If you went in one bechak, it was Kasyan. The Gombechak. The Gombechak is about a duo or a gondur, a boule in the front. And then we went out of the Jalan Sleman out towards across the rice fields, because then Georgia wasn't built up in the same way. And there were Konang, Konang and the rice fields. It was very atmospheric. And we went for about half an hour across the rice fields, along country roads. And then we eventually went over a small bridge and over a little rivulet. And we came into the compound of a dalem, a princely dalem, a residence. Well, the Pendopo, which is newly built by General Serrano of the Diponogoro division, was being performed. And as we came into this palataran, it suddenly dawned on me that where we were, we were in Tagorejo, which was the dalem where Diponogoro had lived with his great grandmother for 10 years, between 1793 and 1803. And then that was his kadiaman. That was his estate. That was his meditation place. That was that was where he lived, you know, and within two hours. So, but he's Dipangil. Yeah, it was like Harusawan. Yeah, Kapada, and it was a sort of it was sung at Elok. It wasn't unchum. I didn't suddenly have a dream about Diponogoro, you know, pointing at me. Or it was just, well, here you are. And this is where you should be. You've paid your respects. Good luck. And then from there, I live for the next 18 months in Georgia and I had the great good fortune because I knew via Oxfam, one of the charities, I knew Ibu Kusumabrotto, who was the wife of Gusti Tejo Kusumu's son, Kusumabrotto, Radhanmas, Vandora Radhanmas Kusumabrotto. And they said, well, Kabatulan, we've got a pendopo, which you can use free of charge if you do up the pendopo. Bukan Pendopo, Tabis, Satu, Bilak, which is a bit like, yeah, yeah, it's a princely dalem. You have a pendopo, you have the Pringitan, you have the Prabhoyakso, you have the area which the prince used, and then all around you have his family. So you had engineer Tejo Ioanno, who... taught, you know, sciences, and then behind me there was someone else who was a civil servant and they gave me one of the pavilions within this. Yeah. So I moved into this pavilion and I did it up. And then everything started to go wrong. I got Trismen Arus at a diarrhea dysentery. My houseboy borrowed my motorbike and wreck the gearbox. Well, you were away. Well, I was away and began to leak the roof, began to leak. And then I went to solo and then I discovered the bamboo sleeping in my bed. So basically I thought, well, gosh, you know, we've got a papata in English, you know, sorrows, misfortunes come in threes. Yeah. They don't come just singly. Yeah. And I thought, well, this is telling me something. Things are not in kilter, not right. Trasansaya Tida Nyaman. And I had a friend at that time, Paul Stange, who lived and was teaching at Satyawachana, but also living in solo. He came over and he said, well, why don't you call? I've got a friend who's a clairvoyant. Why don't you call a clairvoyant? Interesting. Why was it his first suggestion? Well, because he was someone who was studying Sumara Kabatinan. Okay. And he lived from Rasa and he was thinking any Tida normal. It is not normal. Addis Aswatu Young. You say in English badly aspected. It's a badly aspected, you know, this interview is well -aspected. Here we are sitting in a garden on the top of a hillside, but living in the Tejakasuma and with all these things going wrong at once, it indicated that something was out of kilter. and at a spiritual level, at a Dunia Gheib level, not just at the Dunia Kasatmata. So that was why Paul suggested that the first portacol was a young clairvoyant who came, immediately went into a trance, and then began to communicate with the familiar, the spirit, who actually inhabited that part of the Tejakusuman, that pandopo, that particular Pringitannan area, and he happened to be, according to the clairvoyant, Dipponogoros, Amanuensis, his Jurutulis, the person who was his secretary, named Radantumungung Raksoprojo. And he said to me, this man is not at all gruntled, he's not at all happy. And he's making all sorts of trouble for you. Yeah. You got to do three things. You got to have an infusion of down de limo with hot water to cure your stomach ailment. You've got to withdraw your case because my errant houseboy had stolen my camera from the Peng Hakkiman in the Mangkobu men to the south of the Kraton. And you got to Menha Puskan Salasatu Jalanhukum, which is making this community a Rataq, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's causing, it's causing divisions within the community. And in order to, to get the community back and to accept you, you've got to hold a slummatan, which is a religious feast. Everybody gets a crack at the whip in terms of the Nasi Kuning and the Laud Park. You invite Unu Lama to come and give a small homily hot bar. And everybody then partakes and you restore what has been Rataq, you restore the fabric of the community and within the restoration process via this slummatan, you yourself will also be woven into this community. Right. Right. So that was the, his recommendation. I followed it to the letter. I drank down the limo, the infusion. I withdrew the case against the pambantu. I had a slummatan and after that is not as though I didn't see it, but my friend Ben White, who is a sociologist who trained and stayed with me before he went into the field in Dexo, in a colon progo, he saw it of these. processions of Wai 'an figures clad in Wai 'an costume celebrating marriages or celebrating, you know, their upachara. So it wasn't as though suddenly Sim Salabim all the maklukhalus disappeared because it didn't. But I didn't see it. I wasn't digangulagi. And I spent the next 18 months gathering manuscripts, having these transliterated by a wonderful person, Kanjang Radentumgung Puspeningrat, who didn't, you know, I paid him for his paper and I had to pay him for his time, but he wasn't Mata Duita and Samaskali. And I came back with a whole treasure trove of, of staff. And I began to speak in Javanese. And when I went to interview people, they would say, okay, Maspito, here is a Aksoro Jowo. You read that page to me. And I had to be able to read Aksoro Jowo in order to be able to mambuka Pinto Untuk. Of course, of course. So that was my sort of endowment into the world of the Javanese worlds. And at the same time, Paul introduced me to the Sumara group, to Pachardo, who along with Paksutadi and along with Pachsukito, had been the founders of the Sumara Kabatinan organization in the 1930s. Yeah, you see what fascinates me, Peter? Because I don't know, I've never been working in humanities, but it seems like your journey towards research in your field is scholarly as much as it is spiritually. And you are a historian, although I'm not a historian, but I do have a great respect on the discipline itself. It is a very mature discipline, it has its own sophisticated methodologies to attest to, to verify documents, and it's a great discipline that other disciplines would stand upon. But how do you reconcile that spiritual sensitivity and your formation as a historian, and whether or not they contribute to each other in your research? Well, I mean, Richard Cobb always told me a good historian has a second identity. Born an Englishman, my parents were indubitably in terms of their culture and their language and the way in which they operate in the world British, even though my mother was Scottish and my father Irish, and they'd lived most of their time in what was for them, the colonial world. I had then made over the 14 years of my studies and my education, a very British anchorage and identity. But what Richard Cobb was saying is... that a good historian doesn't stop there. It's not de o ombar. It's not reach me down. It's not through a glass darkly. You're not an Englishman trying to understand Java. You actually have to nyamplung. And the only allat to be able to understand how the Javanese work is rasa, feeling. You have to actually develop a quality of rasa. You can't get it by the Pancha Indriya, which is your otak and your logic. You actually have to approach people, the way you sit or how your teeth are. A Javanese is going to pick up on things Simon Head could pick up because he could see my accent, he could see my shoes, he could see, you know, I see my class, but for a Javanese, they're not looking at those sort of things necessarily. They're looking at completely different things because then maybe they'll move firoshat, you know, that they might be able to read people's physiognomy. They might be able to, like the people in Sumara, actually know what you're thinking, yeah? Yeah, yeah. My translator, Paraketri, he wasn't Javanese, he was Tababatak. He knew immediately, I mean, I've just Malayat Dangandiya, Mingyung Lalo, and I met his nephew and he said, when I met with Paraketri, and he'd made this wonderful translation of Kwasaramalan, which meant that the original book, which was written in pretty pedestrian English, could be de -orbitkan in this very Hallus Malay -influenced, classical Malay style. And his nephew said to me, when I was at Corollus Hospital in the Rumaduka, I went to see my uncle, he knew exactly what you were thinking. He knew exactly what you had on your mind. When you said, this is on my mind, yeah, this is on my mind. And when you'd actually said what you come for, he would dismiss you because he said, yeah, I've already read your thoughts. I know exactly. It's a bit like a Sosra Cartono. He didn't need to be phoned up by Sukarno. He already had four chairs ready because he knew that Sukarno was coming to see him with Bongata and Bongsharia. And he had already arranged in his house in Bandung that people operate here on a level which maybe if you go to the fringes of the British Isles, to Ireland, or to Scotland, they have a much greater openness to at that world, the world of dreams, the world of Wanksit, the world of the little people, the world of the fairies. But for the Javanese, Rasa is the Kunshi, which opens the Aladdin's cave. And if you don't have Rasa, okay, you can describe the bark. I could describe the bark of Java. I could describe the bark of Dipanogoro, but I couldn't get at the heartwood. If you want to get at the heartwood, you've got to study, you've got to be like the Javanese, you've got to create a second identity. Yeah, but what's different in your recollection is that you don't see feelings or Rasa as just mere methodology or in order to understand that you have to understand their utilization of Rasa, but you actually indulge yourself in Rasa. So it's not just means to get data or an end. Yeah, I mean, it's a bit like, I mean, there's a great teacher in the forest dwelling tradition in Thailand, a Buddhist teacher called Ajahn Chah. And he said, for my foreign pupils. Ruan, the sphere of experience, the sphere of knowledge is greater than the Thai pupils. Normally. So you have a Ruan, you don't have a lot of time, you can actually open out different, you know, it's a bit like in the Bible in my house, in my father's house, there are many mansions, you know, in an otak that lots and lots of different areas. And for me, it wasn't sufficient. I mean, you know, what the Javanese were offering me was to grow as a person, you know, I'd grown as a person through Winchester and through Oxford. I'd grown intellectually, I'd been able to analyze, I'd been able to develop, I'd been able to to greatly expand my sort of Haudian sphere of knowledge, which in the Jewish tradition is sort of very much the thinking part. But here in Java, they offered me the chance of opening to ferret, which is the opening to the other world, you know, to the world of the great Shmitat of where we are in this world. And that's why I feel, you know, at some stage, Indonesia is going to astonish the world, but it's not necessarily going to astonish the world by winning Nobel Prizes. It'll astonish the world by the fact that most people here operate on Rasa. And once that Rasa is able to be de -orbit come, then lots of people are going to be able to study a particular way of being, a way of demonfahatkan, the opportunity of being a human being. What it is to be a human being is not just being razor sharp intellectually. It's not just being hugely disciplined. It's not just being having a gudang of experience. It's also actually developing yourself as a spiritual being. And that's not necessarily a formal development. You know, when Deepanagara died in Makassa, he spent the last years of his life as a teacher of Tassawof and he gave Ijasa to his various pupils. what I was being offered here in Indonesia by the Javanese in particular, by my experience in Jogja, by the connection with Sumara was the opportunity to actually open a completely different door in your life. I could have stayed in. I could have stayed in Britain. I could have married a girl from Yorkshire. I could have died in Britain. Yeah. But I wouldn't have been a Javanese historian or I might have been an armchair historian. I might've written things which were, uh, intriguing, but they wouldn't have lived at the level of the spirit I had to come here. I had to actually experience this. I had to actually taste it. It's like the Buddha's injunction, you know, um, make this your own disbelief, what I say, 50%. Otherwise you're going to be like a wooden spoon that doesn't know the taste of the soup. Yeah. If I come to Java with a sort of, um, an armory of, uh, Mahatau, uh, with an armory of intellectual, uh, arrogance, okay, I would have got a certain distance, but I wouldn't have gone the full Monty instead of that. You have to actually unlearn things. You have to actually mela takkan. It's a bit like St. John of the cross. You know, if you really want to know what living is about, you have to experience the whole with wanting, not wanting anything of the whole, you have to realize who you are and who you are. You're not Peter Carey. Peter Carey is just a convention. Yeah. It's just, it actually means if you pass that Peter means a stone and Carey in Gaelic Irish means black, a black stone. So it refers to the fact that your ancestors were Smith and poo. Yeah. Um, but basically, you know, what Java is offering is the chance to actually know what is this great business of life and death? Yeah. That's what we've got to solve. It's not enough to become really super duper clever. It's not enough to become super duper astute Machiavellian as a politician. going to die unfulfilled. You've got to know, here we are. We've got this incredible experience of being alive in the world, but being alive in the world doesn't mean it's not just a one -way street. You've got lots and lots of different pathways and lots of different ways of actually maman farkan to have a mise en valer of this life as a human being. And what Java offered me was a mise en valer of that life, which I would not have got if I had just stayed in the zone on Yaman of the intellect. Yeah. Right, right. You mentioned the term intellectual superiority or arrogance. You mentioned that thing. Well, I spent most of my academic career in the UK and I came across the work of Edward Caius' Orientalism. You know, the idea of the Orient being reduced to something akin to mysticisms and not within the door of anything. The Orient is... Yeah, it's Orientalism. And it's very much what Raffles wrote about in the history of it. He said, well, there was a great past, which was a Hindu Buddhist. And then the Javanese have fallen hard, hard times because the coming of Islam, and they are now fallen people. We will essentially remind them of their greatness. But like a sort of elder brother to a younger brother or a father to a son, you know, they came with the arrogance of the enlightenment, the arrogance of Mahatal. Whereas in fact, I mean, I know this from the Battle of Surabaya, I mean, someone like Pachardo, you know, could train his Laskar to actually through their sort of Pancha Indria, have a radar so they would know where danger lay. And they almost automatically could be able to make Hindar Darim out. Yeah. Yes, yes. No, no, that fascinates me. And before we go on on a break, do you think there is a room for that domain of spirituality unique to Java for the Javanese to then project itself in the global world, not as an inferior community, but to use that as as to break away from this Orientalism narrative? Yeah, I mean, this is our pay air. This is our homework. This is our two gas. You got a decolored, it's like Bunkano said, you know, Merdeka, 50% of Merdeka is physical Merdeka, but the other 50% is mental Merdeka. You got to decolonize the mind, you know, it's like what France Fanon wrote in the Black Lives White Masks or, you know, the Wretched of the Earth, you know, colonial leaves behind. and germs of rot, which we must clinically detect and remove, not only from our own bodies, but from our own brains. You know, it's not just physical decolonization. It's not physical. It's also mental. And it's a feeling, you know, it's a bit like what Rumi said. You know, so go with all, take the name of all to everyone, say yes, yes, yes, but dwell in your own village. So you become a global citizen, but you also know exactly who you are. So you're like a good side as a Palestinian or you're like on what harm as a Piranha Khan Chinese, but you're able to Malangangbuwana Dantida Luntur because you actually know who you are. Right. And on that, after the break, I would like to talk to you more about knowing who you are, All right. So Peter, it was early in January last year. I remember coming across your article in which you wrote about Sanguran and Pujangan inscriptions to each Javan -based inscriptions that got excavated, one of which is now in Scotland. And you wrote about these two inscriptions and the necessity to repatriate that. And I got captivated by that. And then I contacted you, and then you very kindly replied. And then that led me to making this conference with some of other newly found colleagues in Glasgow and start to get people talking about it. And could you tell us a little bit about the significance of these two inscriptions stones to both UK and Indonesia? Well, these are two prasasti, which are inscriptions which were taken by the British during their interregnum between 1811 and 1816. Both, as you said, originate from East Java. And they were taken. One was given to Lord Minto, who was a patron and the governor of Bengal, who was a patron of Raffles. And the other was taken by Colonel Colin Mackenzie, who was born in the Isle of Skye and became the chief engineer officer and later surveyor general of India. The first, the Minto stone, is a Sangaran inscription of 928 A .D. And that refers, we think, to a SEMA boundary, the boundary where you would a sacred zone, where you would ordain monks, people who were Chalon bhikkhu, become Dibhusuddha Kannato di Tabiskan, Sabaghi bhikkhu. And that dates from 9 to 8, and archaeologists and early historians think that it's probably one of the first inscriptions of the Shailendra dynasty, the first Mataram dynasty, which is based in East Java, and mirrors the move of that dynasty from South -Central Java to East Java, hastened by the great Praloyo, which was a great disaster, of the Marapi eruption at the beginning of the 11th century. 1006, 1009. Yes. It's important, but... because of that reason, but it's also important because of it's a seam of boundaries. It's a very early inscription. And by rights, it's part of the DNA banksa, your DNA as part of your origins, sung at Maja Mokskali, very rich in terms of the very great diversity of religions and identities which co -existed and co -existed in a lot of harmony. Until recently, and it should, by rights, be in your national museum, yeah? It shouldn't be a garden gnome, a bit like being outside here. Which is what it is now. In a Roxpercher -tied cottage of the Minto estate, yeah? It was given to Lord Minto by raffles, and Minto obviously was intrigued by it, and he brought it up with him, obviously Minto. Everybody associated with that stone died really in quite unfortunate circumstances. Rongolawe, who was the bupati, who oversaw the taking of the stone from the area around Batu, Batu Malang, down to the area of Grisik, or wherever it was trans shipped. He died, and his bones were buried at a crossroads and eaten by dogs. The young artist, John Newman, who made the sketch of the Minto stone with the bupati's team waiting for trans shipment, died young in Chennai in Madras, raffles himself when he came back, died almost on his, I don't know, whatever birthday it was, in 1826, in July 1826, 5th, 6th of July, of a brain tumor. at a very young age, loaded with debt and under a cloud. And Minto himself died on his way back in Hertfordshire, on his way back after standing ovation from both Houses of Parliament, after being the victor of Mauritius and Reunion and Java and coming back trailing clouds of glory. And he actually died of a heart attack just two days or one day out of London. That is where he never saw the stone in his Roxpercher estate. So there is a curse on the back of that stone that whoever handles this incorrectly will experience untold tribulations and misfortunes. So in a way, caveat emptor, be careful. you know, what you come into possession of. But in my book, the Minto family should do what the Baud family did with Diponogoro's walking staff, his Kiai Chokro, which was given back to the nation in the person of Anis Paswedan, who was then the education minister on the 5th of February, 2015. Yeah, it had been, it had been given to their ancestor, Jean -Cretien Baud, who was then Patahana, the Governor General Palaxana at the time, and then became a full Governor General in 1833, and then in 1834, a full Governor General. He lasted for three years, and then he became Minister of the Colonies, so a really important person in Dutch colonial history. And it was given to him. It was given to him as, by Pangran Nottoprojo, as an earnest of friendship between the Dutch and the Javanese after the Java War. So he had no need. It wasn't Dirampas, like the Minto stone. They had no need to give it back. Yeah. But they gave it back. I was in touch with them. Hamstavans phoned me. I was in Bletar at the time, and all my hair rose on end because I thought, gosh, all the attributes of Dipponogora are now coming back. Yeah. And this was one of the ones which came back at that time, the Aqua -Dipponogora exhibit in the National Gallery. So, yeah, it's not appropriate in Roxpercher. It's not the Waverly rule, which says if you have an artifact, which is like Cleopatra's needle or like the whatever it is, you know, in London. And become part of the warp and woof of your own domestic culture. Then that puts a different dimension. on it. It hasn't. It's just an orphan. It's a widow and orphan in the border counties. And the same with the Puchangan inscription. The Puchangan inscription is an inscription from 1041, which basically tells us all we know about King Elonga, who was a really important early 11th century King known as Elonga, because that refers to the fact that he was a monarch who crossed the water between Bali and Java. He became a receive for 16 years before becoming King, founding the kingdom of Kahuripan in the early 1020s. Yes. And then with one of the great sages of the age, Empu Barada, he got Empu Barada using his Toya secti from the gods. to divide the kingdom between his two sons, between Jangala and Khadiri, yeah, between Sidhu Arjo and Khadiri, which was then reunited under Radhan Wijaya in 1293, after the defeat of the Mongol armies with the foundation of Majapayat. So this is part of the warp and woof. The Pujangan inscription is part of the warp and woof of a really important king, a bit like, say, everything we need to know about Edward I, the hammer of the Scots, or someone like Henry VIII, I mean, it's part of your DNA. And where is it now? Well, it's in the Indian Museum in Calcutta, in a go -down, in a warehouse, a leaky warehouse. No one sees it. It's not part of the warp and woof of Indian archaeological knuck class from the Raj. So it should be given back. There should be a concerted attempt by your foreign office to argue Retna Masudi, or whoever is your foreign minister, under the incoming President Prabhupal, needs to put top of the agenda, a negotiation with the regional government of Bengal, the communist government of West Bengal, to actually get this back on loan. And if you have artifacts here, which were taken from India, then you could do an exchange. Just so the listeners are clear, the one in India belonged to an Indian government. It belonged to Colonel Colin Mackenzie. He took it as part of the sort of not war booty, but because he was a collector and because he was sort of the first MI6 agent for the British Raj, he collected all sorts of manuscripts. He was fluent in Tamil and Kannada and the various South Indian languages. And he collected this and when he died, it became part of the East India Company collections. And when the East India Company, when the Raj ended with partition in 1947 at the stroke of midnight in August, it remained behind in Calcutta. And it actually now is controlled by the regional government of West Bengal in their Indian museum in Calcutta. So it's not sufficient to go to Delhi and do a G2G negotiation. You actually have to involve the regional government of West Bengal, which is not Congress, but it's communist. Which what made it difficult so far? Possibly, possibly. But you could you need to offer some form of quid pro quo. You need to offer some form of a face saving device that is on permanent loan. Um, so one, you're dealing with a family, which is a very Scots family, which is Kikir and then the other you're dealing with a, uh, regional government, which happens to be just, just so that we're clear. The one in Scotland is not owned by the British government. It's owned by a family. It's a private, private possession. And that actually should make it much easier. Like my negotiation with the Baud family or the Reichsmuseum negotiation with the Baud family, which ended up with Kei Chokro being given back to the Indonesian people that are on his bus way down at the first inaugural event for the Akwadiponogoro exhibit at the gallery national on the 5th of February, 2015. But both those in my book are part of the DNA bank, sir. Yes. And our prosasty, they are inscriptions on stone, which weather, if you have them out in the open air, they weather the, you've got the beating of the sun. You've got the operation of, of water. So you've got the operation of wind, you know, and if you're in a leaking go down, that's also not the best. They've got to be somewhere where they are put in a room where they are admired and known and studying and studied like the national museum, national gallery in Singapore, one Ming plate, one rather than salade portrait. Um, and that's where they should be. Um, yeah. And it's great that our friendship and our connection started with that because actually in mirrors, a really important, uh, reality that getting back one's lost colonial heritage is a two -way street. Okay. Did you ramp us? It was taken, but you as the. Dispoiled colonial civilization and people need to put your best foot forward and say, this is what we want back. And we have prepared, like the Benin bronzes, a special, like the Elgin marble, a special museum, a special area of the museum to house these. And we've got archaeologists who are going to work with Arlo Griffiths, who's now the FAO head in Jakarta, to do new translations, new transliterations, new, new studies. You had the Gasparis and you had Cairn, a great Sanskritist. You've recently had Arlo Griffiths doing the Puchangan inscription or the Sangorin inscription for a BKI by -drug and article. It's a two -way street, so you need to travel a bit also to meet halfway. Yeah, the British have to be able to, and the Indians have to be able to Dengann, Kamurran, Hati. be prepared to offer these back. But here there has to be a place where they can be looked after because 2013 you had the Materam gold being stolen from the museum. 2017, um, you had the museum Bahari being burnt down with the 75th anniversary maquette of the battle of the Java sea destroyed, which had been loaned by the Australians and the Americans and the Dutch. And recently in 20, 2022, uh, September or whenever it was, you had Gudung Ah, of your national museum burning to the ground. So you've actually got to stir your stumps and say, these are actually the, these are national assets. I mean, why does Hitler, why does Stalin, why does Napoleon all go for the the cultural artifacts of the great, um, Italian Renaissance paintings, the great archeological remains, the great, um, you know, the, um, the Bruges crucifix and the, uh, and these various panels, uh, which you find in Flemish churches, because they know that if you control the culture, you own that culture, then it's much easier to actually conquer a people because their Niali has been cut. It's a bit like the Buddha's, um, you know, reflection on achieving enlightenment, the, the taproot of this desire, which has created this unending, um, life and death cycle has been cut. But this is a negative sense in the sense that this taproot for your culture has also been, been cut by not looking after these things properly. Once you lose them, you lose them for good. And not as though you can go and reboot a computer. Indeed, indeed. I was very fortunate to come across your work on that. And then the more I studied about it, the more fascinated I became. I myself is an earth scientist to some degree. And I never looked at this in a non -heart science way, let's say. But I came across the work of the Anthropocene literatures in which people started to questions the period of time where the people starts to influence geological processes. And then you mentioned about the Pralaia. The Pralaia being the eruptions of the volcano. And then I spent a couple of years of my academic career studying geothermal energies. And through my connection with the British Geological Survey, I came across this idea that if you want to study high -end topic geological. resources, you got to go to Indonesia, because that's a very strategic place. Not only that it's high in topic, it's really manifested. First of all, it protrudes. And I came across samples from the archipelago. And then the fascinating thing about the Anthropocene is that Indonesia and particularly Java, which is your area of study, contributed a lot to the conception of Earth science, as we know today. So in 1960, two research vessels from the US, the Lusiad and the Monsoon, brought their gravimeter and then they set sail to the Lao Tzlatan. And then they took samples there and then tried to study what caused the eruptions of the Merapi. Oh, that's a magma channel all the way from the Lao Tzlatan. The Javanese and the Yogyakartan that you really understand about, already understood it as the relationship between Nye Rokidu and the deity living in the mountain. So the Javanese have lived with the Anthropocene since at least 18th century, at least. Yeah, much longer back. Maybe even much longer back. They don't know about that. So it's not just nationalism, it's not just even identity, but it's also to understand it, to make Indonesia being seen in a different light. And that is a place where hard sciences, even Earth science, emerge from. Do you think there is a room in an international scientific community for that new perspective? Absolutely. I mean, it really needs to be orbited in terms of saying as an Earth scientist, well, actually, this has been the contribution of Indonesia. to this, to our understanding of this particular branch of earth sciences as a subject. It needs to be written in letters of light, in scholarly journals, but also films made about it, and documentaries. It needs to enter the bloodstream, it needs to enter the warp and woof of the way in which people understand their worlds. And it has to be done six summer, has to be done with great discipline and scholarly integrity. It can't be like the canals in Majapai, which are an idea, but inherently unlikely, because Majapai is built in Tro 'ulan on a sandbank, which goes up 32 meters and water doesn't go uphill. no, no great bodies of water to actually feed that canal system. Or more recently, like Unung Padam, where you've had an idea that there was a pyramid here in West Java, which is 25 ,000 years, which precedes that pyramid of Giza by thousands of years. And yet a very fundamental piece of research, which has actually delinked the soil samples with Anthropocene remains had not been done. So an idea was launched and then the article had to be withdrawn. And that is actually not, you know, you need to develop in Indonesia, a culture, a research culture. Yes. That research culture requires, one, the finance. Yeah. So people who are researchers, research projects need to have the type of offer, which was made when I got a first SSRC, Social Science Research Council grant. Yeah. Two, you have to have peer review. Yes. It's not good enough for me to be working away in Sarpong, back to the Chisodani River and produce all these articles, unless I have people looking at them and saying, you can't say that, or you could say that, or you actually haven't thought about that. Why don't you compare the Java war with the Great Slave Revolt in Haiti? Yeah. So you need a community of scholars and you need to have a sense, you need to have sufficient humility to be able to accept criticism. Yeah. And that's part of the warp and woof of the way in which scholars go about their business. And then you have to have. the institutional framework in which researchers, a bit like you who have done years and years of training abroad, now were the youngest assistant professor in Nottingham, got tenure, decide in your full flood, a bit like the head of the Eichmann Institute, Sankar Surti, who was brought back from Australia because of his publication record and because of his scientific profile. You need to create the conditions where someone like yourself can be actually brought back here to a research environment and to a salaried professional financially secure environment in which you can be honoured. have the respect you need, but also have the facilities you need to put your imprimatur on a whole school of scientific endeavor. And that's not happening at the present time. Indonesia is, well, if you look at PISA, which is the Program of International Student Assessment, which is an OECD survey, which is done every two years, which tests mathematics, which is your subject. It tests reading and it tests education in sciences, in the hard sciences. Vietnam, which was right on its back 30 years ago at the end of the Vietnam War, 40 years ago in 1973, is right at the top. It's number eight, much higher than the UK. It's eight in the PISA ranking. Indonesia, they only tested maybe 80, is in the low 60s, which indicates that at the level of education, at the level of the type of education you need to provide a foundation for future academic career or research, that those integuments are not being put in. And then if you look at the profile of your universities, I taught for 10 years, Adjunct Professor at the University of Indonesia, Faculty of Humanities, FIBUE. If you look at the Kwaquareles -Simons rating, UE is lower than a Cordon Bleu College in Kuala Lumpur, which is Taylor's University. Taylor's University, I know 20 years ago, was operating out of Barucho in Kuala Lumpur. It's now 52. UE, which is your premier university in the Asian ranking, is 55, 56, joint with the Hyderabad Technical College. You shouldn't have that. You should have at least in the top 200. You should have, a bit like Malaysia, all five of your top government universities. You should have Iwi, you should have Uge 'em, you should have Pajajaran, you should have Itebe, and you should have Elangar or Deepanogoro. They should all be in the top 200 rankings. They should have. They should have. And you need to create the sort of conditions. You mentioned earth sciences. Well, I could mention the fact that nobody knows this, nobody has an inkling about it, but Batavia Jakarta was the fonts and origo of our knowledge of vitamins in diet because of Eichmann, Christian Eichmann's research on the origins of berry berry. The origins of berry berry were initially thought to be a miasma, a sort of viral infection, a bit like COVID. Whereas in fact, it came about Kabatulan, it came about completely a lampravist. He did all his work at the military hospital. in Batavia. And he kept chickens as part of the laboratory animals. And he fed the chickens military rations. And one day, the cook said, these chickens don't deserve military rations, I'm going to feed them just ordinary brass, yeah, Mera, yeah. And that's what he did. And suddenly these chickens, which have been very poorly and dying, became very healthy. And Eigmann was able to see what are they ingesting? Well, they're ingesting the little gray, silver coating of the rice, which contains vitamin B1. And this is a vital component of rheomycin, iron deficiency in the Ricketts disease, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So the origins of vitamins in diet. Fontenorego was the Netherlands Institute for Microbiological Research, which after Eigmann's Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1930, 1929, became the Eigmann Institute. These are jewels in the crown for Indonesia, jewels in the crown for the world. And I suspect there'll be a lot more to honor. Yeah. And they need to be de gembergéborca. And you need to actually, you need to create the conditions. You need to have a cleaning of the origin stables. Most professors you put on half pay, you need to do what Dindles did with the government, which is basically to clear out the origin stables of the VOC and create a completely new new beginning. Because if you don't do that, the R &D, the capacity for research and development, the capacity from what you've just told me in terms of the earth sciences. what i've just told you in terms of microbiological pioneering microbiological research and one of these students wasn't i can student but he was. A pre -boomy he was a local guy from west sumatra born in a photo cork or in booking and his name was professor mark tahr and at the age of twenty eight in amsterdam in the late nineteen twenties he defended his thesis because he had cracked the secret of leptospirosis leptospirosis is the kenching of tikus in water which creates this rickett this wheels disease yeah in which all your. All your blood vessels begin to. You know go black yeah. I'm and the age of twenty eight he had the he had. He'd cracked this, and if he'd lived, he hadn't been tortured to death by the Kempeitai and his body steamrolled in Anshol. He would have won another Nobel Prize for you after the war. Yeah. So it's not as though you don't have traditions, because you have very Eloch, very remarkable traditions, and you have scholarship. But at the moment, nothing conspires to scholarship here. Everything conspires to a quick fix. That's why you have to withdraw the article from whatever Wylie and Sons journal had published the Gunung Padang. That's why you don't take the idea of canals in Majapai to international fora with Roland Fletcher as the sort of bees knees in terms of Dem archaeological research, you know, archaeological research, which uses the enhancement of the various levels of the ground. You don't take it before him because basically what you want is a quick fix. You want to something grandiose. You want something wah. Yes. But in fact, there's nothing wah in the world of academia. Everything is ten thousand dollars. Yeah, it's like, you know, Edison with a light bulb, you have to have thousands of failures. There's nothing quick. You have to walk a very narrow path. The path of academia, you mentioned this earlier in the interview about walking the path is historian. Well, someone like my mom had to walk an even narrower path to become a world beating microbiologist. And you have to be prepared to walk that path. You have to be in an environment which supports you walking that path and not a quick fix. Academic tick tock world. you know, sort of Indomie style, tossing up a meal in two minutes. Could it be that this quick fix attitude or instant attitude symptomatic to the loss of narrative, because you don't understand where you're going, you don't understand where you're from, you don't have a whole story or an ideal that you want to go after, that makes your policies reactive, rather than from the first principle? Possibly, yeah. I mean, if you go back, you know, someone like Deponogoro, he's not a perfect individual. He's not Ainsan al -Kamil. Yeah, he's not perfect. He's got a roving eye and he can be very cruel and he's extremely sarcastic and ironic, his sense of humor. But Aurang Taliti, he's someone a bit like Collins, Michael Collins, who won the independence for Ireland. by his incredible attention to detail, whether it was finance or intelligence or whatever, he was able to master all sorts of different worlds. He was an administrator who was not corrupt. He was a panglima. He was a mystic. He was someone who was a sastra one. And in each of the particular areas of his life, he bought a degree of commitment and catalitian. And if you look at the people who created a batik industry with batik chap or batik tulis, you know, the batik tulis tradition, years and years, it's a bit like in ancient China, where you take a whole lifetime to carve a piece of jade. You know, if you go back to the tatanan lama of pre -colonial indonesia, which was not digior, not rusak, or a hindia blanda. You have a world in which there are great, remarkable, artistic engineering, archaeological achievements. You have people like M. Buberada. You have people like Elanga. You have people like Gayatri. And if you go back to the pre -colonial past, you're going to find things which astonish you, because this world, the island world of indonesia, is in my book, the epitome of the Polynesian world, the world of Polynesia, which means that women had a very prominent role in this society. If you go back to the 18th century, go back to the 17th century, go back to Majapai, there were military leaders, there were political leaders. Diponogora is brought up at Tegrejo. There's not a man in sight for the first 10 years of his life. It's all women. And you have the most important influence on him, which is Rato Agung, who is his great grandmother. daughter of the Kiai in Sraigen, Giyagandar Poyudo from Majanjati, who basically is the Ujungtombak of the Tarakat Chaturiya in the Jogja court. She is the Ibu Nagara. When Jogja is founded, you have a Bapak Nagara in Magabhumi. She is the Ibu Nagara. And in the Java war, you have army commanders who shave their head as a pledge for the jihad. And you have people who are generals, women generals. You have someone like Niyagang Sarang, Radhanayu Sarang, who cut to pieces Bushkun's column between Damak and Dempo and Samarang. These are not people for sure. When the British conquer the court of Jogja in the early morning hours of the 20th of June, 1812, the only British officer to die is killed by a woman. Yeah. So these, this is, this is the reality of pre -colonial Indonesia. You have a very prominent position for women. And nearly every society is like Meenan Kabbal, you know, that has been lost. It's been lost out of Islamic formalism and the patriarchy of colonialism. Give me the example of one governor general who is a woman or one controller who is a woman. It was all men, unless they were cross -dressers. But the reality of pre -colonial Java is there is cross -dressing. The LGBTQ rights. You know, this is an extremely Majumuk world. You don't want to know about it because it's not persuading and your narrative at the present time. But if you translate the Surat Chantini, you're going to see a Rablesian world in all its red in tooth and claw in terms of the way in which people celebrated their humanity at the same time. You're going to see that this is not a world where you have identities. You're living in little silos. If you go to Lhasa and Rambang, Sampun Manjing Agami Islam, Sudoyo, yeah, Sampun Manjing Agami Sudoyo, all the Puranakan are Muslims. The word Puranakan refers to a Chinese who's actually Masok Islam. And if you Masok Islam at that time, it's obviously a Sufi form of Islam, which is extremely multivalent. Yeah, it can exist, coexist with Kajawen, it can coexist with Hindu Buddhism, it can coexist. If you look at Prabhova's family, members of his family were Catholic nuns, were people who, all sorts of different religions. You know, there's a big big body to the Kirk, a big yeah. Sarambi of that of that society. And that's the reality of precolonial society. And what the Dutch do is completely run a coach and horses through that because they create, for their own political reasons, a stratified society in which you have people like myself who are tiny, picayun, too. 232 ,000 Dutch and Galyka Stelt here in the Netherlands Indies at a time when it was 62 million people in 1940, who are Europeans, but they're right at the top. They don't call themselves Framda Vesterlingen. They call themselves, yeah, Europeans and Galyka Stelt. Then below them, you have the Framda Osterlingen, the foreign Asiatics, Indians, Arabs, Chinese, yeah, who are the second. And then you have the Inlanders. They're not even called Javanese, they're called Inlanders, Andijen, natives, who are all the rest. This is your country. Why do you allow people to come here and actually hoodwink you into thinking that, but this remains behind this form of sort of self -psychosis in which you have this Mindavadigheit, a sense of permanent inferiority complex that is bequeathed. the colonial past. If DiPonegora had won the Java war, there'd be no Netherlands in these states. It would have been clearly different in this issue of to -do with Peddé. And you didn't have Europeans to have to come and tell you this was not an autarky. People were actually exporting rice. They were exporting textiles. Java was a textile and flax exporting center for the whole of the archipelago. That was completely ruined by Leeds and Paisley, Manchester, and everything else, intentionally by the British, because they sent back Bhatticchap of the favorite patterns like Kambangchina in order for the Paisley mills to copy this. But you would have had, what you need is a form of major restoration here. You need to seek knowledge all over the world. You need to be bloody bold and resolute like Prabola has done with the complete mess of Banka Billiton and all the, you know, if Banka Billiton was run properly, that was the one part of the archipelago which the British never gave back to the Dutch until the 1825 treaty, 1824 treaty of London, which Malacca was exchanged for Bancoulou, because it's so rich. If that was properly run, you know, you could give every man, woman, and child 20 juta per month. You'd have no Kambischina in this country. I remember when Bank Century hit the rocks in 2009, one of my staff at the JSPO, the Jakarta School of Presetting and so on, came to me and said, actually, Peter, I was an interrogator for the Kapeghe before I came to join you. And I know that if the Bank Century was properly de -clupas and put in the open, this country would amruk. Yeah, because people would know that there's daylight robbery going on. There's nothing. You don't have to be a poor country. You have to pull yourself out by your bootstraps. You have to be bloody bold and resolute. You have to do what North Korea or China does. Put people in front of a firing squad. Do what what Dinels did on the high road, the post -veg. These people like Seti Novanto, who's got a little wrap across the shuttles and, you know, is living in luxury in Sukhomiski in jail and wherever he is in Bandung. Yeah. These people have to have to, you know, he plundered the country for 4 .2 billion for identity cards. If you had an identity card, you had your tax number on it, you had your driving license, you had your NVEW pay and your your identity, you would save the country millions. And it would also make the work of Bin extremely easy because basically you could go on a computer and you could know immediately where this guy hoes from, what car he owns, where he can be delachak. So there are no easy options for Indonesia. Indonesia at the moment is betwixt and between. It's no longer dirt poor as it was in the early 50s, but not as poor as South Korea in the early 50s. South Korea is now the ninth richest economy in the world. If the United States broke up in a new civil war, California would be the eighth richest economy. In California alone, within the space of six months, more war material was being produced in 1943 than in the whole of Imperial Japan. But you need to actually stir your stumps. You need to take very tough decisions and you can't pandangbulu. If there is someone who is well connected, Akong or whoever it is, they've got to be cut down. These people are plundering your state and this is what happened in 18th century Britain. 18th century Britain was one of the most corrupt states in the world because of all the money flowing in from the colonies, all the money which could be earned from the commercial and industrial wealth of the country. And everything could be bought. But Britain faced an existential crisis because basically just across the channel was France. It had 22 million people. Britain had at the end of the 18th century just 8 .5 million people. And if the Protestant elite via Ireland, which is Catholic, had been detected, where could they go? They couldn't go to America, which was a republic. They could go to Canada, which was very cold, or they could go to Australia, which was extremely far. But they would be wiped out. And because they would be wiped out, because they had their backs to the wall, they basically had to act. You need to create the conditions. like, when was the Republic not corrupt? Well, it was not corrupt for the basically four years it was in Jogja. Four years in Jogja, it had 250 ,000 Dutch and Canil troops at its door. You couldn't be corrupt. If you were corrupt, you're going to saw the branch on what you're sitting. You know, I felt like I could have talked with you forever. But I'd like your final take, your final take on what you have said in the other interviews in which that in order to know where we're going, we've got to know where we originate and from the outside perspective, looking at Indonesia, although you are now in Indonesia, how do you think Indonesians should see themselves in the cosmos, for example, where should they see themselves going? What are their roles in the cosmos? And from that, yeah, for in your own words, mamanusia, kanmanusia, like Samaratulani. You, your, your Dharma, your, you've got to humanize humanity and you've got to humanize it by the fact that this is a country where it's Majumuk, identity politics is not, doesn't rule the roost. It's a country which most people operate on Rasa, a country where people are de wasa enough to know that man doesn't live by bread alone. And basically you have a, a spiritual dimension to your life, but that spiritual dimension is not linked to a particular religious tradition. That is what you're going to give to the world. If the world survives going through the eye of the needle. Thank you very much friends. That's chronicles. Thank you.