Against the Grain

Sulastri and Sudarmo, the protagonists of Suwarsih Djojopuspito’ novel, Against the Grain, faced the inevitability of such events as teachers in one of the unauthorized (“wild”) schools of 1930’s Java. This strongly autobiographical work depicts the lives of Indonesians, particularly its youth, who were imbued with the ideals of nationalism and independence in the 1930s. But the depiction itself is no starry-eyed portrayal of these people. Suwarsih wrote with unflinching realism and perception of the lives of people in some cases struggling and in others prospering under a colonial system— people of this world, the governing and the governed, whose characters and lives are molded by the prevailing colonial laws and practices and often stunted by a stifling patriarchal tradition. Ibu Suwarsih is celebrated as one of the earliest and perhaps the pre-eminent writers of Indonesian feminism.