The Bengkalis Hunger Riots of 1935

Abstract

Students of Indonesia, confronted with massive amounts of European materials which generally tell them less than they wish to know about Indonesians, have often turned to the relatively few incidents of Indonesian social protest or armed struggle in the Indies to provide them with better insights into conditions and changes within indigenous societies and into the dilemmas and paradoxes Indonesians were facing in the Dutch era. Both because these incidents readily lend themselves to social analysis and because they were likely to have elicited deep contemporary administrative research into their causes and courses, actions such as the Diponegoro War,¹ the Aceh War (Useful recent works are Reid 1969, Van’t Veer 1969 and Beamer thesis 1969) and the Bantam Revolt (Sartono Kartodirdjo 1966) in the nineteenth century and, in the twentieth century, the Saminist Movement,² the rapid growth of Sarekat Islam,³ the Jambi Revolt, and the 1926/27 Communist Uprisings⁴ have attracted considerable scholarly attention.⁵. This attention has been richly rewarded. Studies of particular incidents of popular rebellions and unrest in the Indies have accumulated into a body of literature that both is fascinating in its own right and also forms a major introduction to wider, theoretical studies of the nature of peasant life and protest in general.⁶ In addition, however, these studies have uncovered much thought-provoking information about the feelings and reactions of different groups of Indonesians toward such major innovations as the alteration of land-tenure systems, the introduction of the money economy, of taxation in cash, and of large-scale commercial agriculture, and the widening and deepening of the administration, transportation, communications, and education systems in the Indies.