Author(s): Max Lane

History

A nation is exiled from itself to prison; a nation is re-awakened through the storytelling of its origins; understand Indonesia through Pramoedya's books

In 1981, a new company, Hasta Mitra, founded by three men just released from over a decade in prison under a dictatorship, published a novel written in a prison camp by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. The novel was This Earth of Mankind. It told the story of the early gestation of the Indonesian national awakening. It was a best seller and inspired enormous discussion. The dictatorship eventually banned it after several months of tactical struggle by the three men, Pramoedya himself and the fighters of Hasta Mitra, Joeoef Isak and Hasyim Rachman. In defiance of the dictatorship, they went on to publish the three sequels to This Earth of Mankind, each time followed by another battle and then a ban.

This book tells of these men's struggle, from the moment of their arrests, through the prison experience, including the story of the writing of Pramoedya's novels in Buru Island prison camp. It tells of their return from exile into a different Indonesia, with its radical past suppressed. Returning from exile, they explode on to the scene with Pramoedya's epic of the time when the conditions were just forming for the idea of creating such a country as Indonesia to emerge. The new creation story in Pramoedya's novels as well as Hasta Mitra's own struggle to publish those novels in the face of repression inspired a new generation of youth, who succeeded in breaking the dictatorship.

Today, a new generation is being inspired by those same books. So what comes next?