Republicanism, Communism, Islam

Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia

John T. Sidel

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501755620
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

In Republicanism, Communism, Islam, John T. Sidel provides an alternate vantage point for understanding the variegated forms and trajectories of revolution across the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam, a perspective that is de-nationalized, internationalized, and transnationalized. Sidel positions this new vantage point against the conventional framing of revolutions in modern Southeast Asian history in terms of a nationalist template, on the one hand, and distinctive local cultures and forms of consciousness, on the other.

Sidel's comparative analysis shows how—in very different, decisive, and often surprising ways—the Philippine, Indonesian, and Vietnamese revolutions were informed, enabled, and impelled by diverse cosmopolitan connections and international conjunctures. Sidel addresses the role of Freemasonry in the making of the Philippine revolution, the importance of Communism and Islam in Indonesia's Revolusi, and the influence that shifting political currents in China and anticolonial movements in Africa had on Vietnamese revolutionaries. Through this assessment, Republicanism, Communism, and Islam tracks how these forces, rather than nationalism per se, shaped the forms of these revolutions, the ways in which they unfolded, and the legacies which they left in their wakes.

1

FROM BOHEMIA TO BALINTAWAK

Cosmopolitan Origins of the Philippine Revolution

The Bohemian town of Litoměřice, nestled at the junction of the Elbe and Ohře Rivers some sixty-odd kilometers northwest of Prague in the pohraničí (borderlands) of what today comprises the Czech Republic, provides a seemingly unusual, but potentially illuminating, vantage point from which to approach the cosmopolitan dimensions of the Philippine Revolution of the late nineteenth century. Litoměřice, it should be noted, played a prominent role in the development of Czech nationalism over the course of the past two hundred years. Bernhard Bolzano (1781–1848), the mathematician, philosopher, and author of the pioneering 1816 treatise On the Condition of the Two Nationalities in Bohemia, was stripped of his post as dean of the Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague in 1820 on the basis of charges of membership in a secret society said to have been founded by his pupil Michal Josef Fesl, a professor at the Jesuit seminary in Litoměřice. The founding father of Czech linguistics and literature, Josef Jungmann (1773–1847), moreover, offered the first Czech-language courses at the gymnasium in Litoměřice, and later at the Jesuit seminary in the town, at the turn of the nineteenth century, before writing a series of important books on Czech literature (including the first Czech-German dictionary, a five-volume, 120,000-entry magnum opus) and rising to the position of rector of the University of Prague. Even more important, perhaps, the much loved epic romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha was buried in a church cemetery in his adopted hometown of Litoměřice in 1836, but, in one of the most famous and moving episodes in Czech history, his grave was exhumed and his remains moved to Prague in May 1938 in the wake of the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria into the Third Reich two months earlier. As German troops prepared to annex the Germanized areas of the Czech pohraničí that Hitler called the Sudetenland, hundreds of thousands of Czech mourners filled the streets of Prague and streamed past Mácha’s coffin as it was installed in the Pantheon of the National Museum in Prague and then interred in the nearby cemetery of the Vyšehrad Castle, in the company of such other Czech national luminaries as the playwright Karel Čapek, the composer Antonín Dvořák, and the writer Jan Neruda.¹

Yet for the Philippine Revolution, the significance of Litoměřice lies not in its inspirational role in the development of Czech nationalism, but rather as its former identity as Leitmeritz, a town in the Habsburgs’ Austro-Hungarian Empire that drew the interest of none other than Dr. José Rizal, the great Filipino novelist and celebrated progenitor of Philippine nationalism. For Leitmeritz served as the home of Ferdinand Blumentritt, allegedly the scion of a Spanish family that departed Manila for Bohemia amidst the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Philippines in the early 1770s, and a local gymnasium teacher and avid student and scholar of Philippine history and society. In 1886, Blumentritt and Rizal embarked on a lengthy and regular correspondence that lasted literally until the eve of Rizal’s execution at the hands of the Spanish colonial government in December 1896 amidst the popular uprising in and around Manila that constituted the first phase of the Philippine Revolution. Over the course of the decade leading up to the Philippine Revolution, “Professor” Blumentritt corresponded regularly with Rizal, wrote countless articles and letters on the Philippines, contributed to public debates on the Philippines in various publications in Spain, and engaged in assiduous and at times incendiary defense and promotion of his friend Rizal, assisting in the publication of Rizal’s two celebrated novels, Noli Me Tangere in 1887 and El Filibusterismo in 1891. Against this backdrop, Rizal’s visit to Blumentritt’s home in Leitmeritz in May 1887 was an event of considerable significance for the two men, as is evident in the deepening warmth and intimacy of their correspondence in its aftermath. Rizal wrote to Blumentritt from the Moravian city of Brünn (Brno) a week later: “Ich bin ja auch Leitmeritzer vom Herzen wie Sie Philippiner” (I am also at heart a Leitmeritzer, just as you are a Filipino).²

Despite occasional references to “Dr. Czepelack,” a colleague of Blumentritt’s whom Rizal had met during his visit to Leitmeritz, Rizal displays no sense of awareness of or affinity with the budding of Czech nationalism in the Bohemia of the nineteenth century; he shows neither sympathy nor a sense of interest. Instead, the solidarities linking Blumentritt and Rizal lay elsewhere. Blumentritt, it should be noted, married off his daughter Dolores not, as he sometimes half-jokingly proposed, to his young friend from the Philippines, but instead to Dr. Karl Pickert, founder and editor of the Leitmeritzer Zeitung and a prominent leader and parliamentary representative of the German Liberal Party, which countered the ascendancy of Czech nationalism in the late nineteenth century with the promotion of German culture as a vehicle for intellectual and political progress across the Habsburg Empire.³ Rizal’s visit to Leitmeritz, it is also worth noting, came at the tail end of a year-long stay in Heidelberg and Berlin, during which time he continued and deepened his training in ophthalmology: achieved fluency in the German language; and immersed himself in the cultural, intellectual, and political life of the bürgertum (bourgeoisie) of Bismarckian Germany. Among the highlights of Rizal’s sojourn was his induction into the Berlin Anthropological Society, at the invitation of its founder and president, the prominent scientist, German politician, and parliamentarian Rudolf Virchow, who had joined forces with Bismarck to champion what Virchow famously called the Kulturkampf (“culture struggle”) against the Catholic Church in the realms of German culture, education, and society.

Rizal’s visit to Leitmeritz and his correspondence and collaboration with Blumentritt over the last decade of his life thus point to a broader field of experience, inspiration, encouragement, and interlinkages within a set of transcontinental networks of scientists and scholars, liberals and republicans, Freemasons, and other activists and intellectuals stretching across Germany, Bohemia, Belgium, England, and France, and extending into Spain and its far-flung colony in the Philippines. Such connections were built on the cosmopolitan foundations of the Catholic Church, as seen in the transmission to the Philippine archipelago—and the translation into Tagalog—of hagiographic celebrations of the late fourteenth-century martyrdom of Jan Nepomuk, the patron saint and Counter-Reformation icon of Bohemia, by the Jesuits in the mid-eighteenth century.⁴ Even today, statues of San Juan Nepomuceno are found in churches across the country and the Nepomucenos rank among the most prominent local political “ ‘dynasties” in the province of Pampanga, just north of Metro Manila.

But even if Rizal’s visit to Leitmeritz and relationship with Blumentritt meant so much to him, what was the broader significance for the making of the Philippine Revolution? Rizal’s relationship with the Philippine Revolution, after all, was famously ambivalent and ambiguous; he was imprisoned and sent into internal exile in 1892, four years before the outbreak of the revolution, and executed by the Spanish colonial government in December 1896, just a few short months after the revolution had begun to unfold. More broadly, an emphasis on the global peregrinations, transcontinental connections, and cosmopolitan pretensions of Rizal and his compatriots risks an overly (self-)indulgent and admiring focus on small, privileged clusters of effete Filipino intellectuals and flâneurs as they busied themselves in late nineteenth-century belle époque Europe, at the expense of close attention to the broad mass of illiterate, Tagalog- and Ilocano-speaking subalterns—artisans, peasants, and fishermen—back in the Philippines, who provided the foot soldiers of the revolution, and, by many accounts, crucial sources of its ideology and leadership, from its outbreak in mid-1896 in Manila and the provinces of Luzon.

How, then, to connect the likes of Blumentritt in Bohemian Leitmeritz with the Philippine Revolution? The existing body of scholarship on the Philippine Revolution, for all its empirical richness and analytical diversity, provides a coherent narrative account, one whose emplotment follows the nationalist logic so prevalent in the study of Southeast Asian history. On the one hand, the revolution is said to have been led from above by urban—and highly urbane—educated young men⁵ familiar from Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Filipino nationalists who emerged from Spanish colonial schools in the Philippines in the latter half of the nineteenth century and achieved prominence in Madrid and Barcelona, and then in Manila and beyond, as newspaper editors and authors of novels in the late 1880s in what became known as the Propaganda Movement. Literate, educated, well-travelled, and fluent in the colonial lingua franca of Castilian Spanish, this ascendant nationalist intelligentsia was capable of imagining Las Islas Filipinas (the Philippine Islands) not only as an archipelago of great ethnolinguistic, horticultural, and topographical diversity, but as a nation in waiting, populated not simply by populations divided among indios (natives), mestizos, and chinos (Chinese), or by Igorots (upland “pagans”) and Moros (Muslims), but more broadly by “Filipinos,” a term previously reserved for the small minority of criollos (creoles) born of Iberian ancestry within the colony.

These Propagandistas included among their ranks the celebrated novel...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. From Bohemia to Balintawak
• 2. Masonería, Cofradía, Katipunan
• 3. From Baku to Bandung
• 4. From Cultuurstelsel to Komedie Stamboel
• 5. Newspapers, Rallies, Strikes
• 6. Soekarno and the Promise of NASAKOM
• 7. Republicanism, Communism, Islam
• 8. From Guangzhou, Porto Novo, and Antananarivo toward Điện Biên Phủ
• 9. From Cần Vương to Viêt-Nam Duy-Tân Hội to Thanh Niên
• 10. From Thanh Niên to the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) and the Việt Minh
• Conclusion
• Index