The (re)settlement of Sindhis in Independent Indonesia went smoothly. Most migrants had previously stayed in Indonesia or had relatives and friends who were familiar with the place and facilitated the settlement. Moreover, they usually had some savings which helped them during the initial years.24 India strongly encouraged the new
migrants to settle in Indonesia (and other countries in the region) as it was struggling to accommodate the enormous number of Hindu refugees. During his visit to Indonesia in 1951 Nehru "preached unity of his fellow countrymen, and identification of their interests with those of the country in which they lived" (Thompson & Adloff 1955:62). In 1954 a newly appointed Indian ambassador urged Indian businessmen, mostly Sindhis, to hire Indonesians to allow them to benefit from the Indian experience in commerce and to assure "Indonesian friends... that the Indian business community is doing something worthwhile in strengthening Indonesia's economic position"
(Thompson & Adloff 1955:123).
Indonesia, which had amicable relations with India in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, welcomed post-Partition migrants and granted them permanent resident
24 My respondents told me that their parents were able to bring with them some jewellery and
status. It also provided them with the opportunity to help their relatives in India by increasing quotas for remittances: "Indonesia ... eased the application of its monetary restrictions to resident Indians, who were the chief source of income for Hindu refugees from Pakistan (Thompson & Adloff 1955:69). In comparison, foreign Chinese in Indonesia were banned from sending the remittances during the first years of
Independence (Willmott 1961:74). In 1956 Sukarno, addressing the convention of all Indian Business associations from various parts of archipelago, expressed appreciation for the work of the conference and encouraged cooperation "between the Indian
nationals and the Indonesian people" (Mani 1993a:108). In other words, Indian migrant businessmen, the majority of whom were Sindhis, were welcomed by the Indonesian state as Indians, as foreign nationals. There was a call for cooperation, but no pressure from the state officials to assimilate into Indonesian society.
From the early years of their permanent settlement Jakartan Sindhis worked to preserve their cultural identity by forming associations and institutions. In 1947 Sindhi elders established Bombay Merchant Association, the central business association of the community, whose membership was strictly limited to the Sindhis.25 The name of the
organisation was not random but reflected the deep affection Sindhis felt for India, with Bombay seen as the quintessence of Indianness. Such central importance of Bombay is explained by the administrative history of the region (during colonial times, from 1843 to 1936, Sindh was part of the Bombay Presidency, or Province) and the commercial importance of the city in contemporary India.
The founders of the Bombay Merchant Association saw its primary aim in "fostering the spirit of love, understanding and brotherhood and providing the best possible education to the children of the community."26 Indeed, the establishment of the
community school, the Gandhi Memorial School, followed soon, in the 1950s. Along with business and educational organisations Sindhis took care of the places of worship,
25 One of the community members, Suresh Vaswani, in his interview with Tempo magazine in
1996 formulated this exclusiveness of Bombay Merchant Association (BMA) very bluntly: "BMA is for people of Sindhi descent, not anyone else." Interview is translated from Indonesian by the author. "Bombai Merchant Association Belum Mati", Tempo Magazine,
http://www.library.ohiou.edu/indopubs/1996/05/04/0019.html (last accessed 7 Apr. 2016).
26 "Gandhi Seva Loka," Sindhishaan the Voice of Sindhis, htttp://www.sindhishaan.com (last
renovating the existing temples and building some new ones, including the second
gurudwara in Pasar Baru, Central Jakarta, and Shiv Mandir in Pluit, North Jakarta. This is not to say that Sindhis walled themselves off from non-Sindhi society. In business Sindhis were in constant interaction with all kinds of people. Pasar Baru, the place where most Sindhis settled in Jakarta in the 1950s, became well known as an Indian market offering quality textiles for all tastes. In the late 1950s Sindhis restored their connections with the economic elites (local officials and foreign embassy staff) by supplying them with luxury goods through "mail order" business. As the economic situation in the country was deteriorating, many goods were in deficit. Meanwhile, Sindhis were able to bring most of the items to Indonesia by mobilizing their
community connections with Singapore and Hong Kong. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s this "mail order" business helped quite a few Sindhi businessmen to improve their economic status. It also connected them with the Indonesian upper class. Moreover, several families broadened their connections with non-Sindhis when they tried their luck in the film importing and distribution business and established partnerships with local filmmakers (to be discussed in Chapter Three).
It should be mentioned that during the first decade of independence Sindhi children were also exposed to a wide social circle. Gandhi Memorial School,
established by the community, was only for primary level, and for secondary education Sindhi children attended other private schools with English as a medium of education. One of the senior community members shared her memories with me:
I went to a Chinese school in Glodok as it was English speaking. And then I moved to a Convent school, Regina Pacis...It was a proper Catholic school run by nuns where nuns still wore those white robes... Bible was a compulsory subject for us but I need to say that there was no attempt to convert us.... We had a lot of Chinese friends there, Indonesian friends. But when I was in high school there was a regulation that Indonesians had to go to Indonesian schools. At that time I still had Indian citizenship so I could stay. A year after I graduated even people with permanent residence had to go to national schools with Indonesian language. (Sheeja, Indonesian Sindhi, second generation, personal
The regulation that Sheeja refers to was issued in 1957, when the government,
following the proclamation of the state of emergency, severely limited foreign-language schools and instructed Indonesian citizens to transfer to Indonesian-medium schools (Willmott 1961). Three years later, a Regulation of 1960 (Regulation No.48/1960) made it illegal for both Indonesian citizens and permanent residents to attend schools with the medium of education other than Indonesian. The "side effect" of this law and lack of reinforcement resulted in isolation of Sindhis from the Indonesian society and I will discuss it later in the chapter.
The last several years of the Guided Democracy regime (the early 1960s) was the period of most instability that Sindhis experienced during the entire history of their settlement in Indonesia. The anti-Indian demonstrations first took part in 1962 and are usually referred to as the "Sondi affair".27 Stage-managed by Sukarno, young
nationalists held protest marches in the streets of Jakarta and attacked the Indian Embassy (Brewster 2011:223). According to Lubis, a prominent figure in the Indonesian public sphere, who wrote memoirs about everyday life in Jakarta in the 1950s–1970s, after those demonstrations Indian traders from Pasar Baru (predominantly Sindhis) closed their shops for some time and removed the word "India" from sign- boards reading "Martabak telor India" (Martabak from India) (Lubis 2008b:98).28 In September 1965 Sukarno instigated another series of anti-Indian protests. This time the protests took place not only in Jakarta, where an angry mob attacked the Indian
embassy and dozens of Indian shops, but also in other major cities with a significant number of Indians (Semarang, Surabaya, Surakarta). In addition to violent attacks, the government froze monetary transactions of Indian businessmen and took their property (Arora 1982:124; Mani 1993a:109). According to Mani (1993a), the Indian community
27I found different accounts of the "Sondi (or Sondhi) affair". For example, Mani mentioned that
the protests were triggered by the actions of the Asian games official, Sondi, an Indian, who "admitted Taiwan and Israel to the games, overruling Indonesia's objections. Everywhere in Jakarta, Indians were sneered at as Sondi, though no physical threat was used" (Mani 1993a:108). Firman Lubis stated that anti-Indian protests were triggered by the unfavourable comments of Sondhi about the preparation of Indonesia for the Asian games (Lubis 2008b). In his autobiographic book, Raam Punjabi also mentioned the episode of 1962. In his version, it was the victory of the Indian team over the Indonesian one during the Asian Games that provoked anti-Indian expressions (Endah 2005). When put together, these versions tell more about the narrators and their cultural affections than about the actual causes of the protests.
28Martabak telor is a type of a stuffed pancake common in India, the Middle East and
"averted any damage" to its members only due to the close connections of the prominent community members with the military.
In both cases the anti-Indian protests should be understood in the context of the Cold War. In 1962 the dispute between India and China over the Himalayan border turned into a military conflict, the Sino-Indian War. Meanwhile, "the growing radicalism" of Sukarno drew Indonesia closer to communist China as Sukarno was seeking support against the "neo-imperialist" West (Brewster 2011:223). The staged anti-Indian expressions were organised to show support for China in the escalating military conflict of 1962. In 1965 the anti-Indian protests were triggered by the Indo- Pakistani war, which broke out in August 1965. The Indonesian support of Pakistan, expressed in the supply of submarines, missile boats, MiG fighters and support crews (Brewster 2011:223), was Indonesia's response to the active support of India for the creation of independent Malaya and advocacy of a continuing security role of Great Britain in the region (Brewster 2011). The presence of British power in Southeast Asia was a serious constraint on Indonesia's ambitions to establish hegemony in the
Southeast Asian region.
In the late 1965 the Guided Democracy regime, which in the early 1960s was characterised by "economic chaos" (Dick et al. 2002:191), largely unresolved social issues, inherited from the colonial times, and the "unprecedented national prominence" of the Indonesian Communist Party (Cribb & Ford 2010), came to an end. The period between October 1965 and March 1966 is one of the most crucial and violent moments of contemporary Indonesian history. The massacres of 1965–1966 that followed the alleged Communist coup on October 1, 1965, were executed with "generous assistance from the US government and other leading world advocates of liberal democracy" (Heryanto 2006:3) and formed the basis of the New Order's authoritarianism and state terrorism (Heryanto 2006). State-sponsored violence that lasted for five months claimed the lives of at least 500,000 Indonesians.29 Most victims of state-sponsored genocide
were associated with Indonesia's Communist Party, or PKI (Cribb & Ford 2010). In the public imagination—with help of the Western propaganda—PKI became closely linked
29 For more on the Indonesian genocide of 1965–1966, see, for example Cribb (2001a, 2001b,
2002), Heryanto (2006), Zurbuchen (2002), and the special issue of Inside Indonesia, edition 99, Jan-Mar 2010, http://www.insideindonesia.org/edition-99-jan-mar-2010 (last accessed 25 May, 2016).
with communist China and this linkage played a particularly important role in shaping the ethnic politics in Indonesia in subsequent decades.