The end of a century and of a study is a moment for retrospection and reflection. The turn of the twenty-first century is just a numerical event, which does not necessarily contain historical significance. In the Indonesian context, however, historical events at the dawn of the new century invoked a parallelism with those at the dawn of the twentieth century.

The crisis of the liberal economy in the NEI in the twilight of the nineteenth century provided the impetus for the regime change in the Netherlands, which marked the beginning of the ethical “reform” era in the colony. Speaking from the throne in 1901, Queen Wilhelmina promised that the Netherlands would bear ethical responsibility for the people of the Indies. Education and social welfare were regarded as the moral duty of the government. This accelerated the formation of the intelligentsia as the new elite of the Indies society.

Apart from economic crisis and regime change, the dawn of the twentieth century also heralded the inception of Islamic reformism-modernism concomitant with the deepening penetration of Western secularism in the Indies life-world. These contesting new intellectual currents in their encounter with historic indigenous intellectual traditions had a great impact on the formation of the Indies intelligentsia. Some members of the intelligentsia gravitated toward Western secularism, while others gravitated toward Islamic reformism-modernism. Most of them, however, gravitated toward “translation”, by celebrating hybridity and syncretism — the fusion between different intellectual currents and cultural traditions. These varieties of responses combined with differences in socio-economic underpinning to give rise to the diversity of intellectual-political traditions of the intelligentsia.