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| Still standing tall: Raffles' statue in Singapore |
Knocking a reputation
Felling
tall timbers takes more skill than whacking away with a blunt blade.
Tim
Hannigan, Cornish chef turned travel writer and one-time Surabaya chalkie has used an old trick to
seek fame: If you can’t find an unknown
needing elevation and your own tale’s not worth telling, try iconoclasm.
Sir
Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant Governor of Java between 1811 and 1816 is the
target. How could one ill-educated young
man (he arrived in Java aged 30) from a lowly background and with no military
experience have achieved so much?
There have
to be explanations beyond ability, leadership, foresight and intellect. So said the curmudgeons trampled or ignored
by this high achiever – and Hannigan has helped give these belittlers the
chance to hack away at the image in the provocatively titled Raffles and the
British Invasion of Java.
However the
man, like his imposing statue in Singapore, is not easily
toppled. Not because some evidence
against Raffles lacks substance, but because the author strains to hate when he
should have let the facts damn.
Raffles
made mistakes deserving exposure and analysis. He quit Java in near disgrace
having failed to make the colony pay; perhaps because he wasn’t ruthless
enough. He died in debt; a careless accountant – or a man driven by concerns
other than profit?
Blind hero
worship serves no one well. Objective scholarship that re-examines a famous
life is a valid exercise.
To do it
well requires an open mind. Hannigan
says the idea for the book came when Indonesian students claimed all would have
been well with their nation had the British, not the Dutch, been the
colonizers.
Hollanders
have a different view, particularly over the Palembang massacre when 86 settlers and their
servants were murdered after Raffles provoked the local sultan to ‘dismiss (the
Dutch) from his territories.’
Less well
known, and Hannigan has done a service with this revelation, is that in 1811
the British didn’t want Java. Instructions from the East India Company were to
evict the Dutch, destroy their forts and ‘hand the island over to the
Javanese.’ They reasoned administrative
costs would drown profits. They were
right.
Holland had been occupied by the French
during the Napoleonic Wars. The wash-up included the British taking over the
Dutch colony of Java.
The
colonials resisted but were no match for British resolve and the courage of the
extraordinary Colonel Rollo Gillespie.
Raffles,
the administrator, and his boss Lord Minto had other ideas about the future of
Java. They rationalized that the
Europeans and Chinese would be slaughtered if the British quit – a justified
fear as events proved.
Instead,
according to Hannigan, Raffles and his friends ‘fantasised over … an empire of
the mind as much as a political entity … a playground for their intellects and
imaginations, a historical trove of which they – orientalists to their very
socks – could take possession.’
So
instructions were ignored and a great moment to change the destiny of the
future Indonesia
passed. The British Interregnum ran for
five years until another shift in European politics allowed the Dutch to return
and vilify the caretakers.
The locals
learned to keep left on the roads and were treated to some other benefits of
British rule. Torture a favorite tool of
the Dutch – was stopped, but slavery was apparently continued despite being
outlawed elsewhere in the Empire. (Raffles kept eight slaves, says Hannigan.)
Land reforms were introduced, but never finalised.
History is
always written by the victors and Raffles made sure his version was recorded in
triplicate. Here he was helped by his
hagiographer in chief and aide-de-camp, the ‘snivelling sycophant’ Thomas
Travers.
Along with
the writings of Raffles’ second wife Sophia, Travers has been the source of
past favorable histories of Raffles’ rule.
Hannigan labels them ‘mythomaniacs’ and claims to have by-passed their
accounts for original materials such as the India Office Archives in London.
But then he
doesn’t give the reader references.
There are no endnotes to back his assertions, no index to assist
navigation and only 24 footnotes.
Who, for
example, were the clichéd ‘old Asia hands who still sneered at the very mention
of Raffles’ name’ - jealous underlings, the bitter Dutch or impartial
scholars?
Instead we
get slabs of embroidered prose better suited to travel puffs by a writer in
love with the perpendicular pronoun and deaf to Mark Twain’s advice on
employing adjectives: When in doubt, strike out.
There are
too many gratuitous comments like Raffles’ signature style being ‘bombastic’,
his first wife Olivia’s fondness for brandy (‘a little rosy of cheek, perhaps’)
and his ‘insecure egoism’.
Are these
observations grounded on facts or the progeny of an over-worked imagination?
What’s the purpose? Snide asides from the pens of Raffle’s contemporaries
dipped in bile can be judged as relevant or otherwise only if we know the
writers’ pedigrees.
Raffles may
not have personally torn down the jungle strangling Borobudur
but he did approve the work that led to its conservation. Perhaps he plagiarised to produce The
History of Java – but it was published. Others might have spent the money
on armaments and fortresses.
Hannigan
writes well in his accounts of battles where the reader gets a feel for the
terrain, but fails elsewhere by inserting his loathing of a ‘jumped-up clerk
with a ghastly wife’ into the narrative. Others might have found them a loving
and fun couple.
What drove
Raffles, later to become the ‘Father of Singapore’? Did he want to do good but
got defeated by scheming rivals and his own failings? Curiously this book came out just days ahead
of another revision of Raffles – this time by the established biographer
Victoria Glendinning. Reports suggest
it’s more sympathetic.
In the
epilogue Hannigan admits enjoying a ‘sense of iconoclastic outrage’. It’s never
wise to gloat. A smarter writer would
have honed his axe before tackling a giant.
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