IKAL and his ten classmates, who call themselves “the rainbow troops”, attend the only free school in the poorest part of Belitong Island in Indonesia. They learn their times tables with twigs; there is no toilet and when rain leaks through the roof they study under umbrellas at their desks. But … [Read more...]

A schoolgirl falls in love with her teacher; a priest defends a rural village and loses faith in God; a woman plans an affair with a married man. Such are the plot lines in Ayu Utami’s Saman, a 1998 romance novel that became a cultural sensation in Indonesia following its publication. At first … [Read more...]

When Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono came to power in 2004, the general consensus was that he was the best thing to happen to Indonesia since the fall of Soeharto. Today, it is hard to find anyone with much praise for SBY. Many Indonesians are yearning for a “strong-man” president and believe that … [Read more...]

If Australia has been blessed with excellent cartoonists, Indonesia has been similarly blessed with excellent columnists. Thanks to Jennifer Lindsay’s translations, English-speaking readers outside Indonesia can appreciate Goenawan Mohamad’s ‘Catatan Pinggir’ (Sidelines) columns from Tempo … [Read more...]

In the opening pages of Forgotten Wars, historians Christopher Bayley and Tim Harper make a claim about World War Two that could unsettle Western readers. “This was the Great Asian War,” they write, “a connected arc of conflict that claimed around 24 million lives in lands occupied by Japan, the … [Read more...]