From Jail to Jail is an apt title for the manuscript although, apart from his two-and-a-half-year imprisonment by the republican government, his actual periods in jail were not lengthy, consisting of brief detentions prior to deportation by the Dutch East Indies government in 1922, by the United States administration of the Philippines in 1927, and by the British government of Hong Kong in 1932. The intervening periods were dominated, however, by the threat of detection and arrest and by the overwhelming difficulties of survival. The weight of this struggle, combined with the specters of sickness and poverty that haunted him continuously, form the backdrop to Tan Malaka’s life story, itself written in jail.
The text of From Jail to Jail is on the whole an honest account. Tan Malaka indicates where he is holding back (for instance Volume I, pp. 88 and 99, and Volume II, pp. 77 and 108) and cannot fairly be accused of deceiving or misleading the reader. My investigations in archives, newspapers, and other contemporary accounts, and my interviews with Tan Malaka’s family, friends, comrades, and political opponents, have thrown up few factual inaccuracies in the manuscript. This reliability is remarkable considering the circumstances under which it was written, when Tan Malaka was in jail, without access to books or files.
Bibliographic History of the Text
From Jail to Jail is itself a product of jails. The text was written entirely in various jails of the republic (with the exception of the introduction to Volume III, written in Yogyakarta, October 1948). Tan Malaka commenced the work in Magelang jail, where he was detained from March to July 1947, and continued working on it after his moves to Ponorogo and Madiun.
From what I have been able to ascertain, the text was written by hand: Tan Malaka himself refers to obtaining pencil and paper for the work. Section by section, it was collected by visitors and taken to Yogyakarta for safekeeping and transcription.8 The irregularity in the flow of the narrative, omissions, and overlapping of sequences can be explained principally by this fragmented approach, which was occasioned by changing political and physical conditions. Moved to different jails, sometimes held alone, sometimes with his comrades, sometimes under threat of physical attack, sometimes suffering extreme cold and recurring bouts of illness, Tan Malaka produced a text that retains a surprising coherence. The less coherent nature of Volume III may well stem from the fact that he had no chance to develop the manuscript after the initial theoretical chapters beyond merely assembling existing articles intended for further elaboration.
Writing a book of this magnitude in jail without access to a library or to personal files created its own problems. Although the text is scattered with references to a wealth of sources, particularly in the fields of history and Marxism, few are in the form of exact quotations. Visitors were able to bring him some books and maps, and the quotations reveal the nature of these publications: the Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indie, John Gunther’s Inside Asia, Hallet Abend’s The Pacific Charter, and Stalin’s History of the CPSU.9 Other references such as those to Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Lenin are quoted from memory, an ability for which Tan Malaka was well known during his days in Holland.
A major problem with the text concerns a possible chapter missing between Volumes I and II: Volume I ends in late 1929, with Tan Malaka leaving the village of Sionching, and Volume II opens in early 1932, with Tan Malaka in the middle of the Japanese attack on Shanghai. There is no explanation of how he found himself there nor of his activities over the previous two years. It seems likely to me that a section was lost in the process of transfer and transcription. Considerable political significance attaches to this period, however, and a missing section is not the only explanation of the lacuna. Harry A. Poeze, who has written a biography of Tan Malaka up to 1945, is of the opinion that Tan Malaka has deliberately omitted a discussion of this period of his life in order to conceal a reconciliation in August 1931 with the PKI leader Alimin, representing the Comintern, and his agreement to work for the Comintern again.10
In view of the fact that Tan Malaka does refer to the “obligation I had to discharge in India” (Volume II, p. 30) and that elsewhere he states “that in 1932 I still had the confidence of the Comintern” (Thesis, p. 63), it is hard to believe that he wanted to cover up this reconciliation. Poeze maintains that his aim in writing From Jail to Jail was to distance himself from the PKI, while at the time of Thesis he wanted to draw closer.11 While this argument may reflect his intentions at the time he wrote Volume I (late 1947), by the time the volume was published in mid-1948, Tan Malaka was hoping to establish close relations with the PKI. Above all, however, in my view it is highly unlikely that Tan Malaka would attempt to cover up in such a clumsy fashion by dropping two years from his life story and leaving such a break between Volumes I and II. If the omission was deliberate, and done with political intentions, perhaps it was someone else along the way from writing to publishing who took the action.
From Jail to Jail has appeared in a number of different editions, each covering only a part of the work and none bearing its date of publication. Untangling the resultant bibliographic confusion has been a process based on deduction from reports of publication, hazy recollections of people involved, and internal evidence from the manuscripts themselves.
On 18 June 1948 the Solo newspaper Moerba announced the recent publication of Dari pendjara ke pendjara. This edition is almost certainly the ninety-nine page stencilled edition of Volume I. Although it bears no imprint whatsoever, its foreword is dated Solo, 17 April 1948. Subsequently, Tan Malaka’s longtime friend Anwar Sutan Saidi of Bukit Tinggi (West Sumatra) published a printed version of Volume I and the first part of Volume II as four separate parts (numbered I, II, III, and IV). This edition, published by the Wakaf Republik Press, could have appeared later in 1948 or in 1949. The third edition of Volume I, published by Lutan’s Widjaya Press of Jakarta, was numbered “first part, volumes I-II-III,” indicating its derivation from the Wakaf Republik edition. Considering that Jakarta (then Batavia) was under Dutch control until the transfer of sovereignty in December 1949, it is unlikely that a work of this nature would have been published there until 1950 at the earliest.
The only complete edition of Volume II is that published by Pustaka Murba in Yogyakarta, probably between July and November 1948. Pustaka Murba was established by Djamaluddin Tamim, on Tan Malaka’s instructions, in April 1946. Djamaluddin was under detention from July 1946 to July 1947, and it was most likely on his release that work began on the original stencilled edition of Volume I (published in June 1948); publication of Volume II would have followed as soon as practicable. Djamaluddin left Yogyakarta in November 1948. The Dutch occupied the city from December 1948 to December 1949, making publication during that period in Yogyakarta unlikely.
Volume III has appeared only in stencilled form. It was published with a typeset cover by Pustaka Murba, Jakarta, so it is unlikely to have been published before 1950. Indeed one source maintains that it was not published until 1956.12 The stencilled copy bears stamped repagination for the second half. Pages 53-143 are stamped over page numbers 1-91, indicating previous issue, or planned issue, in two parts. I was fortunate enough in 1972 to obtain access to another typescript copy in the possession of Djamaluddin Tamim, which probably was the manuscript used for production of the stencilled version.
As copy-text for my translation I have used the Widjaya edition of Volume I and the Pustaka Murba editions of Volumes II and III. All three were obtained in 1972 from the Wason (now John M. Echols) Collection of Cornell University Libraries. All the other editions mentioned above have been used as comparison texts to reconcile problems appearing in the copy-text. Variations discovered in this process are indicated in the annotations to my translation.13
Several parts of From Jail to Jail have been published separately, including the following: Pandangan hidup (Weltanschauung) (Djakarta: Widjaya, 1952); Dari Ir. Soekrnao sampai ke Presiden Soekarno (Djakarta: Yayasan Tjahaja Kita, 1966); and “Tan Malaka’s Manila Memoirs,” in the Philippine journal Solidarity 1 (no. 1, 1966). A Japanese translation by Noriaki Oshikawa is now underway, Volume I having appeared in 1979. Excerpts from the autobiography also appear in a number of secondary sources on different periods touched on in the autobiography.