Before 1945 there was no Indonesia, but rather a collection of islands spread across the equator that the Dutch made into the Netherlands East Indies. In 1898 a new queen, Wilhelmina, ascended the throne of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Wilhelmina's tropical empire, known simply as the Indies, numbered more than 28 million subjects on the prime island of Java and some 7 million others on what were referred to as the Outer Islands, although not all of these as yet were under Dutch rule. Although she ruled for the rest of the colonial period, Wilhelmina never visited her colony. She never experienced the sudden monsoonal downpours, the green landscapes dominated by volcanoes or the spicy heat, but every year her birthday was celebrated there, with night markets and festive arches.

What was it like for the Dutch, ruling that vast archipelago of Indonesia? The Dutch made up a special, upper social class of the Indies – soldiers, administrators, managers, teachers, pioneers. They lived linked to, and yet separate from, their native subjects. From 1900 to 1942 these colonial rulers worked to make the islands a single, prosperous colony, and for that they expected gratitude. In 1945, when the Pacific War ended and the Dutch attempted to reassert their control over the islands of Indonesia, they were genuinely shocked that some of the peoples of their islands would fight to the death to keep them out. There was a vast gap between Dutch perceptions of their rule and the views of their Indonesian subjects, but it is important to understand the Dutch views, because they have shaped modern Indonesia.

In the early 1970s Pak Sumitra, a local leader in a poor suburb of Jakarta, described for an American sociologist how political control was exercised on a local level. He described how Indonesia shifted from a society polarised between Communists and non-Communists to one in which a distant military government was able to pacify and manage the country. The new government's aim was to create the appearance of order and control.

Pak Sumitra was a veteran of the Revolution, like most political leaders of the times. During the struggle in Tegal, coastal Java, he had come across a magical stone that had protected him from harm when all his comrades were being killed. He attributed to this stone his ability to gain a following when he moved to Jakarta to work in the railway yards, where he became a foreman. The community of which he became the leader consisted almost entirely of railway workers, many of whom were Communists. This man had an antipathy to Communists because members of his family had been killed by them during the conflict in Madiun in 1948. When, around 1955, he became aware that Communists were taking control of the main railway union in the yards, he gravitated to an alternative union linked to the Socialist Party. He voted for that party in the 1957 regional elections and became a main union organiser in 1962, using his social networks to sign up hundreds of workers. By this stage the yards were split down the middle into one or the other faction, and each group of workers became increasingly dependent on their unions to supply them with basic benefits. These benefits included a gamelan musical ensemble that the Communist union obtained for its members and extra rice rations. By 1964 rampant inflation and national political division turned verbal sparring between the two unions into open hostilities. The leader and some of his faction were stoned by Communist union members outside a movie theatre.

Having achieved sovereignty, Indonesians were faced with the task of building a state and nation, but Pramoedya Ananta Toer, reflecting on the fate of the poor, was right to ask if anything had been done to improve their lives. Colonial rule had created institutional structures that could be converted to Indonesian needs, but had also created massive inequalities and an economic system that drained resources and sent profits overseas. The Japanese period and the Revolution left legacies of dislocation, division and death, and it would take a huge effort to rebuild broken lives and industries lost in scorched earth campaigns. Coming out of the Revolution, some Indonesians like Pramoedya expressed deep bitterness about the effects of the tumult, but others felt a great optimism that, free at last, they could form their own destinies.

Presidents, Vice-Presidents and Prime Ministers

sukarno (1901–70), son of a Javanese teacher from the lower aristocracy and a Balinese woman. Educated in Surabaya, where he met many of the nationalist leaders, and then Bandung, where he studied engineering. In 1921 he married Siti Utari Cokroaminoto, whom he divorced in order to marry Inggit Gunarsih in 1922. His subsequent wives were Fatmawati (m. 1943), Hartini (m. 1953), Kartini Manoppo (m. 1959), Ratna Sari Dewi, or Naoko Nemoto (m. 1962), Haryati (m. 1963), Yurike Sanger (m. 1964) and Heldy Jafar (m. 1967). Founded the General Study Club in 1925 and the PNI, or Indonesian Nationalist Association (later the Indonesian Nationalist Party), in 1927. Arrested in 1929 for his nationalist activities, he was tried and imprisoned until 1931, then rearrested in 1933 and sent into exile to Flores and then in 1938 to Bengkulu. Freed by the Japanese in 1942, he headed a number of bodies established by them, including the committee to prepare for independence. In June 1945 he declared the Five Principles of the nation of Indonesia and took part in the drafting of the first constitution. At the end of the war, Sukarno and Hatta were kidnapped by a group of activists in an attempt to force them to declare independence, which they did on 17 August 1945. Sukarno became president and head of a republican government. He remained in this position except for the period 1948–9, when he was a prisoner of the Dutch. In November 1949 he became president of the Republic of the United State of Indonesia and on 17 August 1950 president of the Republic of Indonesia. Subject to seven assassination attempts, he declared martial law and Guided Democracy in 1957. After the ‘coup’ of 1965 he was under military pressure to hand over power to Suharto, which he did provisionally through the Letter of Command of 11 March 1966.

muhammad hatta (1902–80), from Minangkabau in Sumatra, studied in the Netherlands, where he became leader of the Indonesian Association in 1922. Arrested in 1927 but tried and acquitted in 1928, he joined Sukarno's PNI on return to Indonesia and subsequently took part in the Indonesian National Education body (PNI-Baru, or the New PNI) with Syahrir. Both were arrested and sent into exile to Boven Digul in 1934, and subsequently moved to Banda in 1936.

How does one begin to write a history of prejudice, something that by definition resists historicization – and even acknowledgment? I attempt to do so in this book by examining the process of otherization (an inelegant word to describe an inelegant practice), of social and political distancing that is a central part of the history of African Americans and Dalits (ex-Untouchables, or Scheduled Castes as they are called in the Indian constitution of 1950), two long subordinated and stigmatized groups in the United States and India, respectively. It is my view that the juxtaposition of two very different locations and histories (the African American and the Dalit) and, within each of them, of very different kinds of public and private narratives of struggle allows for an uncommon analysis of the workings of prejudice in an intriguing complex of forms and places.

In order to deepen and extend the inquiry that follows, I make another move that is perhaps not entirely predictable. I start with a rough-and-ready distinction between what one might call “vernacular” and “universal” prejudices. The former is, in simple terms, local, localizable, relatively visible, and sometimes acknowledged: say, the prejudice against blacks, “Untouchables,” gays, Muslims, Jews, conquered indigenous populations, recent immigrants, women, and other “minorities.” It refers to calculated behavior that we sometimes condemn – when we notice it, or when it is forced on our attention: racism, casteism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, reductive monoculturalism, prejudice thus as bias, malice, or inherited structures of discrimination, which the state believes it can measure or contain. I have called such prejudice “vernacular” in order to distinguish it from another kind, which is largely invisible because it is widespread (“universal”) and hence seen as “natural.” This “universal” is the language of law and state, and it passes for the common sense of modern society, rarely acknowledged as prejudice. At this level, the history of prejudice becomes even more intractable for it is, simultaneously, everywhere and nowhere.

In focusing this chapter on the reminiscences of a relatively unknown woman, mother, sharecropper, seamstress, writer, and religious educator from Georgia, Viola Perryman Andrews, who began writing in the era of the civil rights struggle, my purpose is more than simply to document another (“hidden”) aspect of African American history. It is rather to identify two different kinds of history, or perhaps one should say two different perspectives on the history of prejudice and difference, and the attendant matter of civil (civic) rights.

Recall in this context my proposition that the prejudice of the modern requires us to speak in a standard, recognizable idiom, and a standard recognizable manner, to have our words (ourselves?) deemed worthy of attention. I juxtapose an analysis of Viola Andrews's personal account with the analysis of the more public accounts presented in the last chapter precisely because these narratives are constructed very differently and seem at first sight (as I stated in the Introduction) to talk past each other, apparently unable or unwilling to engage one another. In fact, as I shall show, they speak of many of the same issues: of racial privilege and prejudice, of unequal access to resources and opportunities, of the daily struggle to survive and maintain one's dignity. For all that, they speak in rather different voices, with rather different emphases.

The term “Dalit conversion” refers at first glance, and in its most common usage, to the mass conversion of Dalits to Buddhism in 1956 and afterward, which I mentioned in Chapter 2, as well as to Islam, Christianity, and other religions at various other times both before and after 1956. I use it, however, to describe a number of different dimensions of the Dalit struggle for self-definition and the redefinition of society, for the conversion represents a remarkable attempt to escape from centuries of stigmatization and oppression. The struggle occurred on many fronts in the mid- and late twentieth century, extending far beyond the realm of religious practice and the attendant social prejudices.

I use Dalit conversion, for one thing, to refer to the Dalit entrance into formal citizenship. That step is marked by the abolition of Untouchability in the Indian constitution of 1950, the institution of universal adult franchise, the extension of key legal and political rights to all sections of the Indian population, and the introduction of statutory safeguards and support for specially disadvantaged groups (in the form of “reservations” or reserved quotas in education and a number of public services), with all the consequences this has had for Indian society and politics. I use it also to register a more diffuse, but perhaps no less significant, aspect of the Dalit objective, which may be described loosely as a conversion to the modern, a condition signified by a discourse of individual rights, self-making, science, urbanity, and a democratic public sphere. These are clearly ongoing processes. Indeed, as I have already suggested, one might argue that the most noteworthy feature of the Dalit conversion is that it is a conversion for the future to a large extent in the future and involving ideally the conversion of all humanity, Dalit and non-Dalit, with the non-Dalit also being recast in that future in a new Dalit mold.

Blora, in the teak forests of northern Central Java, is an undistinguished country town located in a regency of the same name. It lies on the Lusi River and, besides teak, is known for its limestone cliffs. The dusty streets are lined with mainly typical Javanese houses, small wooden dwellings with a welcoming veranda leading on to a front room, where there are chairs ready to receive visitors. Generations in Blora have studied the Koran and other holy works of Islam, woven striped cloth, performed puppet theatre, danced, grown rice or gone off to the sugar mills to find work. The Dutch did not leave much there, a post office – later destroyed in the war – a pillar commemorating forty years of Queen Wilhelmina's rule and the railway.

Yet despite its ordinariness Blora has had more than its share of fame and upheaval. In 1925 writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer was born there and, before him, Raden Mas Tirto Adhi Suryo (1880–1918), an aristocrat who was to become the father of Indonesia's modern press, founder of the nationalist movement and hero of Pramoedya's novels describing colonial society. In Blora Regency is the grave of Indonesia's foremost feminist, Raden Ajeng Kartini, another member of the aristocracy.