The British Assault on Yogyakarta in 2012
Originally published in The Jakarta Globe, 21/06/12
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/archive/the-red-coat-conquest-of-yogyakarta/
At 4 a.m. on June 20, 1812, a column of red-coated British and Indian soldiers came trotting out of the old Dutch fort in Yogyakarta. They jogged swiftly across the grassy sweep of the Alun-Alun, heading for the northeast corner of the Kraton, the great fortified royal city of Central Java.
As
the first light began to seep across the rice fields, they surged up bamboo
ladders onto the ramparts and overwhelmed the bleary-eyed Javanese defenders. By mid-morning, the Kraton had fallen,
hundreds of its inhabitants had been killed, the Sultan and his heir had been
taken prisoner and an orgy of looting had erupted.
The
fall of Yogyakarta was one of the most dramatic and significant events of 19th
century Indonesian history, but two centuries later it has been largely
forgotten. Britain had seized Java and
the other outposts of the nascent Dutch empire the previous year after Holland
itself was annexed by Napoleon. A young clerk named Thomas Stamford Raffles,
later to find fame in Singapore, was left in charge.
***
Raffles
had brought with him a new set of European ideals. The preceding two centuries
— in both the Dutch East Indies and British India — had often been typified by
uneasy compromise between the European newcomers and the local rulers, with
both sides quietly convinced it was they who were really calling the shots. But
Raffles was determined to exert outright dominance over Java, and especially
over Yogyakarta, which, under Sultan Hamengkubuwono II, was the island’s most
significant indigenous power.
In
April 1812, the British uncovered a correspondence between the royal courts of
Java in which the ruler of Surakarta had attempted to incite the Yogyakarta
Sultan to rise against the foreigners. But instead of punishing the Surakarta
instigators, Raffles decided to use it as a pretext for an attack on Yogyakarta
to “impress upon them the character and power of our government.”
The
British invasion of Yogyakarta was an exercise of huge bravado. Most of the
colonial troops were tied up in South Sumatra at the time, and Raffles had just
1,200 men at his disposal, a mix of British redcoats and Indian sepoys. The
Sultan, meanwhile, had an army 11,000 strong. As one British soldier noted, “To assault a
place of such magnitude with so small a force, and the knowledge that we had to
contend with a vast superiority of numbers, could not fail to give a very
serious and appalling aspect to our enterprise.”
Hostilities
began as soon as the British advance reached the old Dutch fort on the
outskirts of Yogyakarta on June 17, and for three days observers were treated
to “the singular spectacle of two contiguous forts, belonging to nations
situated at opposite extremes of the globe, bombarding each other.”
And
then, during the early hours of June 20, the British ceased fire to lull the
defenders into a false sense of security. But just before dawn, they launched
their attack under the command of Rollo Gillespie, a short-statured,
short-tempered Irish aristocrat with an improbable list of conquests on the
battlefield and in the bedroom to his name. Raffles was left behind to watch
from the Dutch fort.
***
Inside
the Kraton things had already begun to fall apart before the first redcoats
even reached the walls. For 200 years the Javanese had been dealing with the
Dutch, and though the relationship had often been marked by bickering and
brinkmanship, confrontations had always ended with the signing of a treaty,
rather than with flying bullets. The Sultan and his subjects were so taken
aback by the violent turn of events that the defense collapsed as soon as the
British troops began to surge into the city.
The
crown prince, heir to the throne, ended up on the run in the alleyways of the
walled city. Accompanied by a clutch of loyal relatives, he had to clamber over
dead horses and fallen tamarind trees, dodge bullets and sidestep rampaging
sepoys. For a scion of a court built on rigid protocol, it was a shocking
experience. It was also a shocking experience for the crown prince’s
26-year-old son, a fiery young man named Diponegoro. He would remember this
early trauma at the hands of Europeans in the years to come.
By
9 a.m. the British had made a full circuit of the walls while Gillespie and a
cabal of cavalrymen galloped around, driving back anyone who tried to flee. The
Crown Prince was found cowering in the locked doorway of the Taman Sari, the
Water Palace, and was arrested. Meanwhile, a few hard-core defenders took
refuge in the royal mosque, just outside the Kraton walls. They managed to hold
off the attackers for a while, and one of the Javanese sharpshooters even
managed to score a direct hit, leaving Gillespie with a bullet wound in his
arm.
But
before long, a welter of cannonballs silenced the last resistance. British
troops burst into the sacred Inner Kraton, opened fire on the remaining
defenders and closed in on the Sultan, who was still ensconced on the Bangsal
Kencono, the Golden Pavilion at the heart of the palace. He was arrested,
marched on foot across the Alun-Alun to the Dutch fort and locked in a back
room.
It
had taken an outnumbered British advance just three hours to overturn centuries
of refined royal protocol with the loss of just 23 soldiers; unknown hundreds
of Javanese died.
Meanwhile,
the Kraton itself had erupted in an orgy of looting as British and Indian soldiers
went on the rampage, plundering royal treasuries, dredging ditches and ripping
up floors in their search for valuables. Gillespie and the other top brass had
staff loot on their behalf — the commander’s personal haul of gold, jewels and
cash was valued at 15,000 pounds (around $750,000 in today’s terms). Raffles
and the British Resident at Yogyakarta, John Crawfurd, seized the entire
contents of the court archive, taking away a mass of manuscripts which are
today largely locked in British museums.
The
next day the British placed the bruised crown prince on the battered throne as
Sultan Hamengkubuwono III. Instead of the usual carefully calibrated ritual on
the Siti Inggil pavilion, the coronation was a hastily contrived affair in the
old Dutch Residency. Raffles was seated beside the Sultan, and when the
courtiers rose to greet their new king, Crawfurd physically forced them onto
the ground to kiss Raffles’ knees. It was the first time Javanese aristocrats
had ever had to pay such homage to a European.
A
treaty was hastily penned, which declared that the new Sultan would acknowledge
“the supremacy of the British Government over the whole Island of Java.” The
old Sultan was shipped off to exile in Penang, and one of his younger brothers,
a prince named Notokusumo, who had gone over to the British ahead of the
invasion in the hope of being appointed a puppet ruler, was granted hereditary
title to 3,000 households, a little kingdom within a kingdom, under the new
royal moniker Paku Alam.
On
June 23, Raffles headed back for the colonial quarters of the coast. “The
blow which has been struck at Djocjo Carta has afforded so decisive a proof to
the Native Inhabitants of Java of the strength and determination of the British
Government, that they now for the first time know their relative situation and
importance,” he wrote. “The European power is now for the first time paramount
in Java.”
***
Today,
there is little popular recollection in Indonesia of the traumatic events of
June 20, 1812. Even in Yogyakarta itself, the only story told about the British
invasion — that they renamed the city’s main street, Jalan Malioboro, after the
Duke of Marlborough — seems to be untrue. There is no record of such a
rebranding in the British accounts, and the name is probably an older
corruption of malybhara , a Sanskrit word meaning “adorned with flowers.”
But
you can still explore the remnants of the ramparts which the British stormed,
the Dutch fort that they occupied and the royal mosque, the Masjid Agung, where
the defenders made their last stand. The ninth Paku Alam is still the head of
the royal house the British founded and is the hereditary vice-governor of the
Special District of Yogyakarta.
The
wider significance of the conquest of Yogyakarta was that it really did mark —
if only in theory — the point at which European power became “for the first
time paramount in Java.” Diponegoro, the young royal who had been beside his
father the crown prince during that humiliating flight through the Kraton,
would eventually launch a violent five-year last-stand against outright
subjugation in the form of the Java War of the 1820s. However, there would be no more room for the
old power-sharing and compromise of the 18th century. When Britain handed Java
back to the Dutch in 1816, the scene had been set for an unrivaled European
empire in Indonesia that would last for 130 years.
© Tim Hannigan 2012
For more information see https://rafflesandjava.wordpress.com/
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