One of the earliest (ca. 1810—1820) surviving examples of Javanese batik, this piece (right) remained in the Raffles' family until it was donated to London's Museum of Mankind in 1939, Its border was made separately and stitched to the fabric.
Birth of an Industry
In 1815, only four years after Sir Thomas Raffles and the British arrived in Java, the victorious nations at the Congress of Vienna decided that, in order to achieve world harmony, a balance of power would have to be imposed. Thus, the East Indies came to be restored to the Dutch who promptly revoked the reforms of Raffles.
The Dutch remained in the East Indies for almost another century and a half, turning much of the area—especially land-rich Java—into a vast state-owned plantation, cultivated by forced labor with product quotas. Java became a keystone of Holland's commercial empire in the Indies. Its pluralistic society, strengthened by Chinese immigration in the seventeenth century, now became stratified: Dutch on top, Chinese (and sometimes Arabs) in the middle, and the indigenous population at the bottom.
For most Javanese—excepting some Eurasians, a few nobles, some merchants and their families and friends—life was hard indeed. "No Dogs or Inlanders" was not an uncommon sign in public places. Dutch schools were closed to non-Dutch; land could be bought only by the Dutch. Although slavery was finally abolished in 1860, and a civil service was established along with some educational reforms, life for the people of Java continued grimly.
Nevertheless, profound changes were taking place beneath the surface. Between 1815 and 1860, the population of Java doubled, then doubled again by 1900. The plantation system, which had cultivated cotton, tea, and coffee, now began to grow rubber and nut palm as well. The discovery of petroleum brought vast new wealth to the Netherlands, and a flood of Dutch civil servants came to oversee the empire—thousands of administrators and clerks, many of whom would come to view Java as "home."
An 1855 lithograph entitled A Native School in the Kampung. Javanese village life is still much the same, more than a century later.
Chinese musician plays a popular instrument called the Kong-a-Hian.
All this was significant for the history of batik. The population explosion, both Javanese and Dutch, increased the availability of labor. New roads and railroads brought raw cotton and finished batik to growing markets. As the economy grew, there were more batik producers and more people who could afford to buy batik. From 1850 to 1939 the Javanese produced some of their finest work.
There were interruptions along the way, most notably the worldwide depression that began in 1929. Already threatened by cheap Japanese imports, Java's textile markets shriveled, and many men and women trudged from town to town in desperate search of employment. The economic dislocation was long and severe, resulting in the permanent loss of many local batik styles and specialties.
Then came the awful disruption of World War II as well as the culmination of the anticolonial struggle, which closed most batik factories and killed or exiled many of Java's batik entrepreneurs, their talents lost forever. In light of these travails, it was appropriate that when Indonesia achieved independence after the war, batik became the symbol of a unified nation.
A wealthy nineteenth-century Chinese is borne by two Javanese in a hammock with a bamboo roof.
This imposing house belonged to the mayor of the Chinese community in Batavia in the last half of the nineteenth century.
A session of the colonial court in either Kudus or Japara after an uprising of the poor protesting famine. The Dutch resident acted as judicial chief, aided by representatives of the Chinese and Islamic communities as well as the local chief.
LIFE IN 19TH CENTURY JAVA
Raden Saleh, photographed in a costume he designed, was a nineteenth-century Javanese painter who had visited the courts of Europe.
Raden Aju, wife of the regent of Kudus, with retainers.
The Batik Process
To appreciate batik fully, one must understand the extreme intricacy of the process and the great patience, care, and skill that it demands.
In Java, the long and laborious batik process begins at home or in factories that evoke William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" of nineteenth-century England. Since electricity is precious, workshops tend to be dim and dark. Often batikers must work by the natural light that somehow sneaks through the cracks and crevices of a workshop's roof.
With the unrelenting Javanese humidity and the unremittent vapors of molten wax, air hangs heavy in these factories, whose dirt floors are often muddied by rain. Women sit barefoot on mats or low stools, huddling in small circles around pans of heated wax, sharing the contents. Six days a week, they work from dawn to midafternoon for the equivalent of eighty cents to one dollar and fifty cents a day, about what it costs to feed a family. They range in age from ten to seventy, and they are considered no more than common laborers. From such sweatshop conditions come some of the most splendid textiles in the world.
In every true batik, wax is painstakingly applied to the cloth to resist successive dyes so that wherever the cloth is waxed, dyes cannot penetrate. For example, if the desired design is a