Abstract: This article explores the cross-colonial cooperation employed by two subjugated groups, Javanese aristocrats and Bengali sepoys, to resist imperial authority of the British East India Company in early nineteenth-century Java. It focuses on colonial subjects perceiving a world that encompasses more than their colonial borders, and identifying a common cause with other colonial subjects.
In the latter months of 1815, during the brief British occupation of Java (1811-1816), Bengali sepoy Captain Dhaugkul Singh and his men readied themselves to murder all of the British, Dutch, and Chinese residents in central Java, and to proclaim Singh as governor of the island. Over the preceding months they had convened several secret meetings, encouraging fellow Bengali sepoys and a number of Javanese aristocrats to take part in the proposed mutiny. Notable among the list of Javanese co-conspirators was Pakubuwana IV, Sunan (Emperor) of Java and ruler of the central Surakarta court. But unbeknownst to the Bengali sepoys, Pakubuwana IV developed a scheme of his own. He agreed to Singh’s intrigue, but planned only to utilize the military power of the sepoys in his attempt to oust the British from their colonial rule. Once the British were defeated, Pakubuwana IV planned to reclaim his hereditary authority over the central Javanese kingdoms. Concomitant with this was the hoped for departure of the sepoys and their return to Bengal. In the end neither Singh’s nor Pakubuwana IV’s plan came to fruition. During the planning stages, word was leaked to a British officer, and the plot unraveled. The sepoy leaders of the planned overthrow were summarily executed or exiled, as were a few high-ranking Javanese nobles. Ultimately, British officials regarded this joint colonial resistance of the two different ethnic/religious groups as nothing more than a “conspiracy” and a failed attempt at rebellion.
This article explores the cross-colonial cooperation employed by two subjugated groups to resist imperial authority in early nineteenth-century Java. Specifically, I focus on the role played by Bengali sepoys and Javanese aristocrats in their attempt to expel British colonial power from the island in 1815. Although the cooperative rebellion of these two groups was never realized, it nevertheless illustrates the growing resentment of those deemed “inferior” by the British. It also illustrates the ways that subject peoples sought to use religion to position themselves in opposition to colonizers; for instance, how the sepoys and Javanese believed that non-Muslims and/or non-Hindus should not rule over them. Further, it demonstrates cooperation between diverse ethnic and religious groups at least one hundred years before most historical studies recognize this type of collaborative resistance.
Exploration of this topic not only ensures a greater understanding of Indonesian history, but also serves as a model for exploring the importance of other, seemingly unremarkable instances of cooperative resistance across colonial boundaries, and the ways that a shared identity of subjugation was marshaled to fuel the fires of that resistance. Indeed, further research into nineteenth-century protest movements of “non-Western peoples against European-dominated colonial regimes” such as the Sepoy Conspiracy of 1815 in Java, the Ghost Dance of the 1890s in the western United States, or the Maji Maji Rebellion of 1905-06 in German East Africa, can contribute to a greater understanding of modes of cooperation and resistance. Whether these forms of resistance were active or passive, public or hidden, they equally illustrate the feelings of discontent and resentment among colonized peoples, in national or “transnational” contexts. This study of the Sepoy Conspiracy, then, is also relevant to the field of World History because it provides a new perspective on colonial resistance that transcends the boundaries normally drawn between imperial territories and between the religions and ethnicities of colonized subjects.
To date, there has been only one academic study of the Sepoy Conspiracy. The work in question was written by former Oxford University professor Peter Carey in 1977. Though Carey noted the significance of the Sepoy Conspiracy in both “the history of the Indian army and for internal developments at the Central Javanese courts,” he did not frame the impact of this event in terms of connections in World History. In this regard, my article builds from the base of Carey’s work, but emphasizes its larger importance in terms of its significance in the context of World History and postcolonialism as an example of both colonial resistance and cross-colonial cooperation.
Several scholars have written about resistance in Java, primarily against Dutch forces, and many have chosen to focus on the role of Prince Diapanagara in leading a united Javanese peasantry and nobility against the Dutch in the Java War of 1825-30. Noted works on this topic include Ann Kumar’s “Dipanagara (1787?-1855),” Merle C. Ricklefs’ “Dipanagara’s Early Inspirational Experience,” and Peter Carey’s voluminous The Power of Prophecy. Religious protest movements in Java are deeply interconnected with colonial resistance, and scholars on Javanese history have also highlighted this connection, with works such as Justus M. van der Kroef’s “Javanese Messianic Expectations” and Sartono Kartodirdjo’s Peasant Protest in Rural Java. Common to all of these works is a focus solely on Java, with little reference to the outside world. An exception is Michael Adas’ Prophets of Rebellion that examines several millenarian protest movements in a comparative world setting. However, Adas, like the other scholars here listed, focuses only on individual ethnic group reactions to colonial encroachment. Building on these works, my project intervenes in the standard history of Javanese resistance to show that extra-Javanese forces were important as well.
Primary sources utilized for this article consist of original documents and court-martial records available in the Bengal Secret and Political Consultations of the British Library in London. Other primary sources include Lieutenant-Governor Raffles’ version of the Sepoy Conspiracy which was published in 1817 in his two-volume work The History of Java, as well as personal recollections, correspondence, and descriptions of Java and the Sepoy Conspiracy published by other British officers of the time, including George Augustus Addison, John Crawfurd, William Thorn, and Thomas Otho Travers. Building on primary source documents of British and French military officers, as well as British and Dutch citizens in Java, this article incorporates the studies of British, American, and Dutch scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Peter Carey, M.C. Ricklefs, and M.L. van Deventer. The primary sources are many and varied in this collection, and present a thorough recollection (from the colonizers’ perspective) of the events which led up to the Sepoy Conspiracy. However, the abundance of British primary source material paradoxically illustrates a weakness in the historical record – a lack of non-European, specifically Javanese and/or Bengali, primary source material. Thus, my primary sources, consisting almost entirely of British diplomatic correspondence, present the perceptions, motives, activities, and behaviors of the subjugated groups through a limited or skewed lens, leaving little voice or agency to the colonized. To remedy this problem, I borrow from the theoretical works of scholars of postcolonialism and subaltern studies to present the agency of the subjugated groups largely neglected by their Western contemporaries. Their monumental works on “modes of perception” and the construction of identity aid in the development of my argument that Western constructions were used to keep colonized peoples subservient to colonial rule. Thus, my methodology draws from several theoretical works (resistance studies, postcolonialism, subaltern studies, and World History), and forms a qualitative analysis of predominantly British primary and secondary texts. Further, I also draw upon non-history fields including Anthropology and Religious Studies in evaluating this primary and secondary evidence.
The primary theoretical basis of my article relies on central themes of World History, namely “connections, linkages and interrelationships.” I primarily utilize the term “connections” as it has been argued by scholars such as Jerry Bentley, Marshall Hodgson, Patrick Manning, and Eric R. Wolf. Though studies on connections are common in World History, very few relate specifically to the type of cross-colonial and religiously-interconnected work that is apparent in the case of the Sepoy Conspiracy, or for that matter, that deal with Java or Indonesia. Thus, although I rely on the theories and historiography of World History, my article adds a new and unique dimension to the field by concentrating on connections that have not received their due attention.
This article is divided into three sections, each of which portrays the Sepoy Conspiracy from the lens of the cultural group involved: Javanese aristocrats, European imperialists, and Bengali sepoys. The central argument of this work focuses on the importance of the Sepoy Conspiracy, and its illustration of emerging national and inter-national identities and colonial resistance. More specifically, my argument deals with colonial subjects perceiving a world that stretches beyond their borders, and identifying a common cause with other colonial subjects. Further, it illustrates the emergence of cross-colonial cooperation between colonized peoples over one hundred years before it was thought to arise.
Finally, I argue that the importance of studying the Sepoy Conspiracy does not rest on its uniqueness. The cross-colonial cooperation demonstrated by Bengali sepoys and Javanese aristocrats in 1815 Java is an example of colonial resistance which undoubtedly occurred in numerous regions and periods throughout the imperial era, such as the Denmark Vesey plot of the 1820s in Virginia. Both the Denmark Vesey slave plot and the Sepoy Conspiracy in Java illustrate a broader, heretofore largely unrecognized movement of subjugated peoples hailing from distant lands, who chose to battle together against Western colonial domination. Thus, it illustrates anticolonial cooperation across social, cultural, and geographic boundaries, while also seeking to lower or eliminate the temporal/chronological boundaries that scholars have placed on this subject. Overall, by focusing on the specific encounters of these disparate groups and how they worked together, scholars can make broader theories about protest movements and imperial resistance, as well as gain a greater understanding of the complex dynamics between colonial and colonized groups globally throughout the nineteenth century.
Edited by Dhara Anjaria
(c) 2013 The Middle Ground Journal, Number 6, Spring, 2013. See Submission Guidelines page for the journal's not-for-profit educational open-access policy.