In this article four photographs of mixed law courts (landraad) in nineteenth-century colonial Indonesia are approached as a window to study the materiality and meaning of cloth in courtrooms. The photos grant access to a careful colonial curation as well as complex Javanese hierarchies that were translated onto and through cloth, and its colors and patterns. Batik sarongs, tablecloths, head scarves, robes and gowns, coats and turbans reveal a courtroom of semiotic richness and plurality where different actors were signaling different messages to multiple audiences. This emphasis on cloth contributes to an emergent and rich discussion on the importance of objects in the study of law and empire, that has primarily focused on the materiality of paper and other objects of lawmaking. In the mixed court of the landraad, it was cloth that spoke louder than words and paper. This article emphasizes that in a mixed court the display of a plural world and jurisdictional layering, complicating the binary between direct and indirect colonial rule, was more important than a monolithic reflection of state law. Cloth was crucial to the display of this plural world and used as a way to impose, maintain, alter, insert oneself in or resist colonial rule. READ MORE
This book explores the ways in which Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean world produced and shaped Islamic law and its texts, ideas and practices in their local, regional, imperial, national and transregional contexts. With a focus on the production and transmission of Islamic law in the Indian Ocean, the chapters in this book draw from and add to recent discourses on the legal histories and anthropologies of the Indian Ocean rim as well as to the conversations on global Islamic circulations. By doing so, this book argues for the importance of Islamic legal thoughts and practices of the so-called "peripheries" to the core and kernel of Islamic traditions and the urgency of addressing their long-existing role in the making of the historical and human experience of the religion. Islamic law was and is not merely brought to, but also produced in the Indian Ocean world through constant and critical engagements. The book takes a long-term and transregional perspective for a better understanding of the ways in which the oceanic Muslims have historically developed their religious, juridical and intellectual traditions and continue to shape their lives within the frameworks of their religion. READ MORE
Pangeran Aria Achmad Djajadiningrat was a prominent Indonesian bupati (regent) under Dutch rule, who depicted the following childhood memory in his memoirs. One night, in the 1890s, when he was a Hogere Burgerschool (HBS, secondary school) student in Batavia, he and his friends decided to go on a quintessential teenage boys’ adventure; they attempted to visit a boarding school for girls at night. The boys were caught by the police and sent to the assistent resident (a Dutch administrator). But, upon arriving at his office, the assistant resident sent Djajadiningrat to the jaksa (local prosecutor) for punishment because he was Javanese. Djajadiningrat felt humiliated... READ MORE
This chapter focuses on colonial liberalism in practice in the colonial courtrooms of nineteenth-century Java, studying colonial jurists and officials as ‘intermediate thinkers’ of empire. What exactly changed in the practices of colonial criminal justice when legally trained judges were introduced as landraad presidents in 1869? The chapter discusses the liberal ideals of Dutch lawyers and focuses on the experiences and actions of the landraad judges within their new professional environment, looking at their interactions with the jaksas (Javanese prosecutors) and Javanese court members in the pluralistic courts. Although the Dutch jurists argued they were bringing the rule of law to Java, they not only continued but also enhanced the unequal practices of the colonial legal system, thereby establishing ‘a rule of lawyers.’ READ MORE..
In 1918 a Dutch colonial judge wrote in a newspaper article that when he consulted the Javanese Islamic advisor—the penghulu—during a criminal court case, the penghulu always used “one or another Arabic phrase for an Islamic punishment,” and his advice sounded “as a hollow, unknown sound which therefore immediately gets lost”. This description of the penghulu in colonial discourse is exemplary for how Dutch colonizers depicted and approached Islamic law in colonial Indonesia. Most colonial lawyers expressed little interest in the workings and writings of the region’s Islamic legal traditions. And although it was mandatory to consult the penghulu’s advice in court cases where the suspect was Muslim, this advice was hardly followed....READ MORE
Through an institutional approach and by focusing on long-term developments, this article offers a genealogy of the pluralistic character of the landraad (regional colonial court) in colonial Java. It argues that the pluralistic landraden—consisting of a Dutch president, Javanese judges, a local prosecutor, and Islamic and Chinese advisers—were crucial to the process of colonial state formation. This long-term process reflects continuities rather than rupture and change between the era of the VOC and the nineteenth-century developing colonial state. The spatial sites of the landraden reveal not only the conflicts between several layers, institutions, and individuals in the process of colonial state formation but also the importance of local actors in this process. Local dynamics as well as tensions between the various layers of the colonial state, which were striving either for uniformity or for the maintenance of local pluralities, provide insights into the complex formation processes of dual rule from below. READ MORE..
The Indian Ocean functioned as a maritime highway that connected different cultures, societies, and religions over centuries. In the oceanic realm, law flowed through the circulation of people, ideas, texts, ships, and goods. Those were not exclusive and autonomous entities: they coexisted, conflicted, and were inevitably hybrid in themselves. European codes and Islamic kitabs, qadis in Oman or Zanzibar, penghulus in Java, investigation committees in Bengal, school councils in Ceylon, and ships in Mauritius got intertwined in recurring webs of law. Law shaped and was shaped by these hybridities on the large oceanic canvas, with many micro-sites varying from ports to courts. READ MORE..
Afgelopen zondag werd in Indonesië de Nederlander Ang Kim Soei geëxecuteerd door een vuurpeloton. Hij werd in 2003 aangeklaagd voor betrokkenheid bij de productie van XTC en veroordeeld tot de doodstraf. Een gratieverzoek en diverse diplomatieke pogingen door de Nederlandse overheid haalden niets uit bij de Indonesische president Joko Widodo, die een hard beleid voert op het gebied van drugsmisdrijven. In Nederland werd geschokt gereageerd op de executie. (...) Een wijzend vingertje van Nederland als het gaat om mensenrechten, schiet in Indonesië al snel in het verkeerde keelgat. Als we een en ander in historisch perspectief plaatsen is dat niet onterecht. Nederland zelf heeft een discutabel verleden als het gaat om mensenrechtenschendingen in koloniaal Indonesië en hield in Nederlands-Indië de doodstraf in stand... READ MORE
Image: Landraad session in Banyumas, between 1897 and 1903 [KITLV no.119285].