History with Documents: New Research on the Indonesian Left

The Indonesian left has always been on the defensive when it comes to the production of history. Though it is commonplace to associate anticommunism most strongly with the 32 years of Suharto’s Orde Baru or the New Order Regime (1966-1998), such a deep-seated political view has long been presupposing the Indonesian state and society since the late colonial period. Anticommunism has manifested itself in different guises throughout the last century, from the Dutch counterinsurgent police (Shiraishi 2021) to the sanctioned maturation of the army during Soekarno’s Guided Democracy (Roosa 2020, Ch.1) and the manufactured fear of the rise of communism (kebangkitan PKI) in the contemporary Reformasi period (Estrelita 2024). Immediately after the suppression of the Prambanan Revolt in 1926/27, the Madiun Affairs in 1948, and the Genocide in 1965/66, leftist ideas were systemically exterminated alongside and along with dead revolutionary bodies (Lane 2009; Wahid and Novianto 2017). Imagine how much more we would have learned about Indonesian peoples’ history if Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s treasured library had not been raided (Farid 2014) or about the land reform resolutions if the peasants’ front Barisan Tani Indonesia were to continue their field research (Leksana 2024). The emergent scholarship about knowledge production written by Indonesian scholars details the intricate terrains of state censorship and silenced archives with which the surviving left tarry to make their history (Theo 2021; Hanafi 2022; Madasari 2023).

*The Act of Killing*, a 2012 documentary film directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. Wikipedia Commons

The anticommunist underpinnings, which do not aim just to obstruct but eradicate leftist historical production, have never succeeded in stopping the process altogether. Beginning from the end of Suharto’s presidency, we have witnessed multiple movements of what historian Asvi Warman Adam (2009) calls “historical rectification” (pelurusan sejarah) that debunk the New Order’s fabulations and recuperate leftist perspectives. Important milestones include the Indonesian Institute of Social History (ISSI)’s oral history project in the early 2000s (Roosa, Ratih, and Farid 2004), the release of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing or Jagal (2012) in the early 2010s, the International People’s Tribunal of 1965 stewarded by Saskia Wieringa in the mid-2010s (IPT 2016), and the campaigns against forgetting (gerak ingatan) in the 2020s (Leksana 2023). Though never enough to restitute justice to the victims, hundreds of documents have been generated, new records uncovered, and archival materials declassified as a result of such dedicated activism. While the archival silence constrained early-Reformasi historical scholarship to the leftist critique of Orde Baru’s historiography (Curaming 2003; McGregor 2007; Karsono 2013), researchers in the last ten years—most notably Jess Melvin’s (2018) discovery of the Indonesian genocide files in Banda Aceh—have been blessed with voluminous publications and more open access to collections that were impossible to imagine two decades ago. The change in material conditions has shifted the scholarly direction from deconstructive critique to critical reconstruction.

Not losing sight of combatting disinformation about the left, scholar-activists have begun to harness these novel research opportunities by challenging the earlier scholarship, using newly available sources to rework their claims, and recuperating alternative intellectual references. The five contributions in this special issue, “History with Documents: New Research on the Indonesian Left,” arguably follow this general tendency in offering fresh insights into the conventional knowledge of different periods in leftist history and historiography.[1] The essays are organized chronologically, spanning from colonial to contemporary periods and covering a diverse array of innovative inquiries in leftist research, including urban politics, political women, existentialist philosophy, the Malari incident, and the post-COVID labor movement.

Jakarta, Indonesia. March 20, 2025. Protest action in front of Indonesia’s parlianment building. Students activist rejected the TNI Bill which cobtains an expansion of the military role in the state. Photo: Toto Santiko Budi / Shutterstock.com

Andi Achdian shifts the level of analysis from the elite’s high-level decisions to the socialists’ quotidian negotiations in colonial Surabaya’s municipal council during the 1910s, whose intentions were to reconfigure the imperial machinery from within. Contrary to the study by Ruth McVey and Takashi Shiraishi on the early formation of the Indonesian Communist Party, which overlooks female communists, Rianne Subijanto unearths the praxes of these ordinary political women who identified as perempoean kromo (lower-class women) in the popular Red Movement of the 1920s. Through Marxist ideology critique, Windu Jusuf exposes existentialism’s bourgeois individual retreat from class struggle that led the critical-minded Indonesian socialists to comply with the New Order’s authoritarian developmentalism by the mid-1960s. Offering a historical-materialist reading of the 1974 student demonstration-turned-riot incident known as Malari, Sylvia Tiwon develops a notion of manufactured turbulence from Javanese female thinker Kartini to elucidate the military government’s diversion tactics that obscure the violent process of capitalist accumulation in Indonesia. Lastly, in examining the omnibus law on job creation, Intan Suwandi reveals the law’s insidious effects in heightening the exploitation of workers and illustrates an informed roadmap for bolstering the labor movement amidst the neoliberal assault.

It is important to highlight the Indonesian identity of all contributors, three among them female, who write courageously against the anticommunist terror. They are in good company with many other Indonesians who share the quest for truth, freedom, and justice for the left. Together, they may overturn the balance of force and cease to take a defensive position.

Thiti Jamkajornkeiat
Thiti Jamkajornkeiat is Assistant Professor of Global Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Victoria (Canada). He works on intellectual history and political theory at the intersection of Marxism, anticolonialism, and Southeast Asia, specifically Indonesia and Thailand. His first book project investigates left internationalism in Indonesia during the Bandung era through the intertwined circuits of third worldism and minor communism.

[1] The phrase “History with Documents” plays with the title of Omnia El Shakry’s (2015) essay “History without Documents” that reflects on the problematic specific to the archives of decolonization.

Main Articles in seven languages

Book reviews: Issue 41, (September 2025)

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Authors: Helen Ting M. H. and Donald L. Horowitz (eds.)
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Development in Spirit. Religious Transformation and Everyday Politics in Vietnam’s Highlands
Author: Seb Rumsby
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Reviewed by Kirsten W. Endres

References –

Adam, Asvi Warman. 2009. Pelurusan sejarah Indonesia [Straightening Out Indonesian History]. Yogyakarta: Ombak.
Curaming, Rommel A. 2003. “When Clio Meets the Titans: Rethinking State-Historian Relations in Indonesia and the Philippines,” Ph.D. Dissertation. Australian National University.
El Shakry, Omnia, 2015. “‘History without Documents’: The Vexed Archives of Decolonization in the Middle East,” The American Historical Review 120, 3 (Jun.): 920-34.
Estrelita, Gloria Truly. 2024. “Beyond Leftist-Phobia: Political Prejudice and Stigma in Indonesia,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Political Norms in Southeast Asia. eds. Gabriel Facal, Elsa Lafaye de Micheaux, Astrid Norén-Nilsson. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 247-58.
Farid, Hilmar. 2014. “Rewriting the Nation: Pramoedya Ananta Toer and the Politics of Decolonization,” Ph.D. Dissertation. National University of Singapore.
Hanafi, Taufiq. 2022. “Writing Novels under the New Order: State Censorship, Complicity, and Literary Production in Indonesia, 1977-1986,” Ph.D. Dissertation. Leiden University.
IPT 1965. 2016. Final Report. Bandung: Ultimus.
Karsono, Sony. 2013. “Indonesia’s New Order, 1966-1998: Its Social and Intellectual Origins,” Ph.D. Dissertation. Ohio University.
Lane, Maxwell Ronald. 2009. “Mass Mobilisation in Indonesian Politics, 1960-2001: Towards a Class Analysis,” Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Wollongong.
Leksana, Grace. 2023. Embedded Remembering: Memory Culture of the Anti-Leftist Violence in Indonesia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Leksana, Grace. 2024. “When Science Meets Practice: Knowledge Production and the Indonesian Leftist Scientists in Times of Decolonization,” Lecture. Leiden University, December 13.
Madasari, Okky. 2023. “The Creation of An Imposter Nation: A Study of Silencing, Censorship, and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Indonesia,” Ph.D. Dissertation. National University of Singapore.
McGregor, Katharine E. 2007. History in Uniform: Military Ideology and the Construction of Indonesia’s Past. Singapore: NUS Press.
Melvin, Jess. 2018. The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder. London and New York: Routledge.
Oppenheimer, Joshua (dir.). 2012. The Act of Killing. Denmark: Final Cut for Real ApS.
Roosa, John, 2020. Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965-1966 in Indonesia. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Roosa, John, Ratih, Ayu, and Farid, Hilmar. 2004. Tahun yang tak pernah berakhir: memahami pengalaman korban’65: esai-esai sejarah lisan [The Year that Never Ended: Understanding the Experiences of the Victims of 1965: Oral History Essays]. Jakarta: Elsam.
Shiraishi, Takashi. 2021. The Phantom World of Digul: Policing as Politics in Colonial Indonesia, 1926-1941. Singapore: NUS Press and Kyoto University Press.
Theo, Rika. 2021. “The Djogdja Documenten Revisited: Reparation, Silence, and the Seized Archives of the Decolonization War,” Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Amsterdam.
Wahid, Abdul and Novianto, Arif. 2017. “Genosida Intelektual (Intellectualcide): Pemberangusan Ideologi dan Kaum Kiri di Kampus Indonesia Pasca September 1965” [Intellectual Genocide (Intellectualcide): The Eradication of Ideology and Leftists on Indonesian Campus after September 1965], MAP Corner Klub MKP UGM (24 Feb.).

Main Articles in seven languages

Article 1 by Andi Achdian

Article 2 by Rianne Subijanto

Article 3 by Windu Jusuf

Article 4 by Sylvia Tiwon

Article 5 by Intan Suwandi

Book reviews: Issue 41, (September 2025)