Historians may have come late to the study of women and gender in Southeast Asia, but when these three books are placed along a historiographical spectrum one can only be impressed at how far the field has moved in approach and methodology. Exploiting previously untapped sources that emanate from very different sites — a Dutch East India Company courtroom, the women's quarters of a Malay palace, the privacy of a Javanese home — the authors open up new avenues by which to explore the complexity of Southeast Asia's gender history. Though the contexts are very different, the movement through time (Wives, slaves and concubines is set in the late eighteenth century, Victorious wives in the nineteenth, and Realizing the dream in the twentieth) provides an opportunity to gauge shifts in representations of ‘femaleness’, attitudes towards gender roles, and women's responses to change.

Given the often turbulent passage towards independence, it is natural that the evolution of modern nation-states has been a major theme in Southeast Asian historiography. Because the study of gender in Southeast Asia has evolved in tandem with prevailing academic preoccupations, it is also understandable that the first attempts to accord women a ‘significant’ history were concerned with their space in the national story. Encarnación Alzona's The Filipino woman (1934) begins with the arrival of the Spanish in Cebu in 1565, but, as an educated activist, her main goal was to assert Filipina entitlement to the same voting rights as men.Footnote ¹ A similar preoccupation with the state's gender regime is evident 25 years later in Cora Vreede-de Stuers’ ground-breaking L’emancipation de la femme indonésienne. Emphasising that Indonesian women should become the ‘partners’ of men, Vreede-de Stuers took as her starting point the year 1900, which she believed inaugurated both nationalism and the women's movement.Footnote ² Before that, apparently, women had no history.

While the history of nationhood in Southeast Asia still wields a heavy hand, a range of recent publications have helped to construct a more nuanced and female-conscious past.Footnote ³ Drawing on previously ignored or overlooked sources, they have identified new spaces in which the history of women and gender can be fruitfully explored. As Eric Jones demonstrates in his study of late-eighteenth-century Batavia, one such space is the courtroom and its population of ‘ordinary’ people. As defendants, plaintiffs and witnesses in both civil and criminal cases, their recorded statements provide details of lives that rarely entered the purview of power-holders. Pioneers in the new ‘social history’ who opened up the possibilities of such documents — testimonies, affidavits, interrogations, confessions — also demonstrated the value they held for historicising gender relationships. Carlo Ginzburg's 1966 exploitation of material arising from the inquisition of alleged witches in northeastern Italy was the harbinger of an ever-expanding corpus of works on witchcraft trials in pre-twentieth-century Europe and America that use gender as their fulcrum.Footnote ⁴ Although women are often seen as victimised by legal procedures, scholars working in societies as far apart as Italy, France, China and Mexico have demonstrated that female defendants may have been disadvantaged by stereotypes and prejudices, but that many were able to use the law courts to their own advantage. Existing documents supply often startling evidence of the ways in which non-elite women, accused of sometimes serious crimes, were nonetheless able to respond to judges, justify their actions to their families, and negotiate with public authorities.Footnote ⁵

An appreciation of Wives, slaves and concubines also requires an understanding of the Southeast Asian historiographic context in regard to women and the law. While relatively few pre-nineteenth-century court records have survived, colonial interest in customary law led to the publication of numerous indigenous legal texts and generated numerous studies, some of which drew attention to the position of women.Footnote ⁶ This interest has continued into modern times, with one of the most impressive compilations being the Lê Code of Vietnam. Indeed, it has even been claimed that the Burmese compilations of legal and ethical codes, the Dhammathat, may be ‘our only source on gender relations in pre-colonial Burma’.Footnote ⁷ Yet relatively few scholars have tried to see how the law was actually applied and how judicial procedures affected common people, especially in criminal matters. In some cases it is likely that this material is simply awaiting examination, since Tamara Loos refers to ‘thousands’ of archived trial records in nineteenth-century Siam. Her examination of cases considered by the Dika, the Supreme Appeals court, provides concrete illustrations of the impact of legal change, especially in relation to gender and class.Footnote ⁸ Studies using legal records from colonial and religious courts in Singapore and Malaya also show that gender-sensitive research is certainly possible here for the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁹ For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, legal documentation produced by the Dutch East India Company (VOC, Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) is probably the richest source for social history. In his study of Cirebon between 1680 and 1792, Mason Hoadley used several court cases to examine the influence of Dutch law and administrative structures on indigenous legal institutions.Footnote ¹⁰ Judicial hearings and notary records supplied many of the most interesting insights in Hendrik Niemeijer's magisterial study of seventeenth-century Batavia.Footnote ¹¹ In Melaka, another Dutch-controlled centre, Radin Fernando drew on murder investigations conducted under the auspices of the Court of Justice to construct ten ‘stories’ that provide fresh insights into the social life of a busy port town. More particularly, he argues, the sense of verisimilitude conveyed by courtroom statements (including hesitation, conjecture, and fabrication) ‘[gives] the feeling of listening to someone across the passage of time’.Footnote ¹²

Jones approaches the late-eighteenth-century records of Batavia's Schepenbank, the Court of Aldermen, from a similar standpoint. His study is based on the belief that ‘courtroom drama’ can provide ‘a population that was previously nameless and faceless’ with its own narrative by illuminating the lives of ‘little’ people, and particularly women (p. 91).Footnote ¹³ From the outset he stresses that two different legal systems operated in Dutch Batavia. The Council of Justice had jurisdiction over all criminal and civil cases concerning VOC officials, employees, their wives (often local Eurasians) and their household members. Judicial responsibility for Batavia residents who were not connected with the Company, including free Asians, Europeans and slaves, was assigned to the Schepenbank, established in 1620 and disbanded in 1809. Its members (variously seven to nine, who could be free citizens as well as VOC officials) were appointed annually by the Council of the Indies, and there was no requirement for specific legal training.

Schepenbank responsibilities covered a range of activities, from supervising the administration of local markets to oversight of midwives, but the focus of Wives, slaves and concubines is the administration of law in regard to runaway slaves. The first three chapters survey the existing literature in order to establish the commercial and legal context in which the Schepenbank operated, and the role of gender within this wider framework. Though this overview is undoubtedly useful, specialists will be more interested in the detailed case studies drawn from Schepenbank records covering (with some extended gaps), the years from 1775–93 and now housed in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague. The majority of the fugitive slaves who figure in these documents were accused of crimes against their owners, from whom they had stolen or in a few instances, physically attacked. The perception of slaves as property and the legal division between ‘slave’ and ‘free’ meant that owners were almost always privileged in any legal decisions. A slave accused of stealing from a master or mistress was invariably treated severely, since domestic theft was considered far worse than ordinary theft; even attempted suicide by a desperate slave was regarded as robbing the owner of his property (pp. 123, 136). Violence obviously merited far worse punishments, especially in the case of the death of the victim. Only very rarely was any consideration given to the treatment that might have provoked a slave to run away or to attack his or her owner.

The testimonies and confessions (often obtained through harsh interrogation and torture) of women like Danie from Sumbawa, Sitie from Makassar, Tjindra from Bali and Esperanca from Bugis provide humanised, disturbing, but informative details of cruelty and abuse, especially by mistresses towards their female slaves. The risks of living among Batavia's underclass are no better illustrated than in the unsolved murder of a twelve-year-old girl, Tompel, the slave of a Chinese woman, in 1791. Enticed by adults, Tompel was persuaded to steal her mistress's jewellery box. A few days later she was found in a canal with a noose tied tightly around her neck. The murderer (who had presumably stolen the jewellery as well) was never apprehended, but two of Tompel's accomplices were executed and the others flogged, branded and condemned to hard labour for fifty years (pp. 98–102). Though appalling to modern eyes, this form of ‘severe correction’ and the belief that harsh punishment would act as a deterrent to crime was a feature of eighteenth-century Europe, and it was many years before reforming ideas took effect.Footnote ¹⁴ Far from the metropole, courts in Dutch Asia routinely imposed punishments such as flogging, public exposure, and forced labour. Yet even here we can detect some gender differences. Because female slaves were more likely to abscond rather than attack an owner, they normally received lighter punishments, although a life of toil on public works probably meant an early death (p. 139).

As Nigel Worden has reminded us in the case of South Africa, fear of retribution, and especially of extreme pain, was a major means of controlling Batavia's growing slave population.Footnote ¹⁵ In Southeast Asian studies this dimension of slave control has been understudied because the category of ‘slaves’ has typically incorporated debt-slaves, people who had mortgaged themselves and their labour in lieu of payment. As a number of studies have suggested, a debt-slave relationship with a master or mistress was similar to that of client and patron, and mutual obligations were often conceptualised in terms of kinship reciprocity.Footnote ¹⁶ For slaves brought before the Schepenbank, however, this was not the case. Expected to bring back ‘coolie money’ by working outside — peddling goods, selling food and at times purveying sex — in addition to their domestic duties, slaves became commodities. Despite their physical relationship with a male owner, even the slave-concubines who figure in Jones's book never saw themselves as part of a family, and animosity and suspicion often infused their dealings with other household members. Cruelty and abuse, particularly of female slaves, militated against the creation of kinship-type reciprocities, and any alliances among slaves who came from different parts of the archipelago were usually short-lived and opportunistic.

One should hasten to add, however, that the court documents do show another side to this bleak picture. Since they were able to work outside, slaves could hold back some of their earnings, obtain credit, and perhaps buy their own freedom. Those anxious to display status might rent fine clothes and even hire another slave to carry their belongings. Favoured by their owners, some women did very well, and there were men who were willing to go through the protracted process of freeing their female slaves in order to transact a legal marriage. Though Sitie of Makassar (whose interrogation extends over 2,500 words) was not so fortunate, for some time she lived with her master in a situation resembling that of a common-law wife, governing an entire household, wearing expensive clothes and jewellery, and accompanied on outings by her own small slave retinue. Her punishment for absconding (a severe beating, fifteen years hard labour and subsequent exile) is a telling comment on Dutch condemnation of slaves who sought to reject their status as fixed property.

In the interstices of these documents there are other details that throw light on attitudes and beliefs that determined individual actions. An abusive mestiza Chinese concubine causes her male slave to run amok; an Ambonese female slave runs away with her goldsmith lover; Sitie of Makassar defrauds Chinese businessmen using the credit of her ‘Moor’ master. In her testimony Sitie justified her conduct by claiming that she had fallen under the spell of a certain ‘Kyai Dukun’, to whom she had originally gone for help in curing a toothache. He had given her supernaturally-empowered texts to be worn on her stomach, promising that her ‘husband’ (i.e. her master) would thereby regard her absence leniently. In addition, she claimed that ‘Kyai Dukun’ had cast a spell over her, so that she was mysteriously attracted to him and had been seduced into running away (pp. 110–19). For such women the issue of rape and forced intercourse did not arise because their bodies were ‘property’; against the repeated violence by female (often Chinese mestiza) owners who were the primary supervisors of domestic slaves one must therefore place the unrecorded cases of sexual violence and humiliation implicitly embedded in the life of any female slave. References from the period frequently refer to mistreatment of native women by Chinese and European men, and the posed nineteenth-century images Jones has included convey a disturbing sense of the objectified voyeurism with which many were regarded.Footnote ¹⁷

The violence that forms a dominant theme in Wives, slaves and concubines is a reminder that court trials are not really about ‘ordinary’ Asian men and women (pp. 3, 23). In the case of Siam, Tamara Loos notes that only special cases reached the Dika, and although they help to access the lives of criminals, the lower classes, and women, the details may have limited application to Siamese society more broadly.Footnote ¹⁸ As Jones himself notes (p. 25), there are innumerable stories that are forever lost, since the successful runaway will not appear in court records. And, one might add, many slaves were unable or unwilling to face the danger and uncertainty of absconding. References to owner frustration with slaves who stayed out late or failed to pay attention to their tasks suggests a form of passive and deliberate but low-level recalcitrance that was for many the only viable response to ill-treatment (pp. 128, 137). Nor were the VOC courtrooms the only site of judgements that affected women; cases concerning ‘runaway wives’, for instance, have survived from Batavia's Chinese Council, although we have no information about minor disputes that were settled by the leadership of Batavia's different ethnic groups.Footnote ¹⁹ Even the records available, as Jones points out, must be treated with caution, since confessions were often extracted through torture or were fabricated to present the accused in a more favourable light.

In assessing the material presented in these documents, we need to remember that the courtroom itself functioned as a showroom in which all participants were to some extent actors. Jones refers to the ‘dramas’ that were played out, and the idea of treating trials as theatre is well established in the literature.Footnote ²⁰ Mary Kilcline Cody's recent study of the 1911 trial of Mrs Proudlock (the only British woman accused of murder in British Malaya) provides a fascinating example of the staging of court procedures and the performances of both defendant and witnesses.Footnote ²¹ The court records that Jones used are drained of the emotions that slaves must have experienced as their confessions were recorded, but the narratives he has provided do give a sense that these individuals were fighting to avoid torture, years of physical punishment and in some cases, execution. A woman accused of maltreating her human ‘property’ might therefore deliberately present herself as a slave rather than a concubine in order to gain court sympathy, or a male slave could claim non-involvement in a crime by contending that he remained loyal to his Chinese mistress, who was in financial difficulties. In deflecting interrogation, Sitie from Makassar undoubtedly hoped that accusing Kyai Dukun of witchcraft would cast doubt on his declarations of innocence (pp. 101, 118, 135).

While recognising the new material this study makes available, some caveats are in order. Given the extent of VOC material from the seventeenth century, much of which is still unexplored, one could question whether the sources presented here ‘comprise some of the oldest and it seems most extensive narrative sources from men and women in early modern Southeast Asia’ (p. 4). Although Wives, slaves and concubines certainly opens up new ways of thinking about gender relations in the mixed ethnic societies that developed in so many Asian cities, the information offered does not really provide answers to ‘the beginnings of the modern economic world system’ (p. 5). Nor can the emergence of an urban underclass in Dutch-ruled Batavia be seen as simply a colonial creation (p. 6). The commodification of human labour, the view of slaves as property and cultural approval of brutal punishment as a means of subjugation were common features of the early modern world.Footnote ²² Long after Britain had abolished slavery in its own territories, colonial authorities in Malaya returned two female slaves who had fled from the Perak ruler's residence. The punishment these fugitives received went unrecorded, but the previous year a son of the Selangor sultan had reportedly drowned two recaptured slave women as an example to others. Footnote ²³

This reference, taken from an earlier article by Mulaika Hijjas, forms an appropriate transition to a consideration of Victorious wives: The disguised heroine in 19th -century Malay syair. The material used is very different from trial documents, but it can also be regarded as theatre, for the genre of Malay poetry known as syair was primarily intended as a public performance. Though the origin is debated, and though a written form is known only from the late sixteenth century, the oral-aural environment in which syair developed is unmistakable.Footnote ²⁴ Sung or chanted, the four-line stanza using the rhyme scheme aaaa drew on a standard repertoire of word endings (-nya, -kan, -ta, -ian, -ang, etc.) that facilitated extemporaneous composition, Their popularity was also a function of their versatility, since the subject matter could incorporate virtually any subject — religious instruction, dynastic histories, accounts of significant events, romantic stories, allegorical parodies.Footnote ²⁵ Whether the purpose was educational or entertaining or a combination of both, Malay life offered innumerable occasions at which syair could be recited. Because interpolations and additions were very easy, and because they were often expected to provide entertainment for several hours, syair sometimes reached epic-like lengths (the published version of Syair Siti Zubaidah is well over five hundred pages).

Until the nineteenth century syair circulation was limited because copying a manuscript was slow and expensive, but from 1828 the establishment of lithograph presses in Batavia, Singapore and elsewhere provided a cheap form of duplication.Footnote ²⁶ Ian Proudfoot calculated that syair were the most popular works produced by Malay publishing houses, a fact that observers noted even at the time.Footnote ²⁷ In 1896 R.J. Wilkinson, later Director of Education in British Malaya, presented a lecture to the Straits Philosophical Society in which he commented that ‘the books sold in the Singapore bazaars are mostly “shairs”’. Costing as little as three cents a copy, they commanded ‘a considerable circulation’ and were shipped to Sumatra and various parts of the Peninsula. With some perception, Wilkinson remarked that the importance of syair had been overlooked, and that they should ‘claim our first attention because of the public interest’.Footnote ²⁸

This opinion was not necessarily shared by other members of the Philosophical Society. Responding to Wilkinson's lecture, Otto Blagden probably expressed the view of many colleagues when he asserted that ‘very few of the shaers are readable … to the Western mind they are an intolerable bore’.Footnote ²⁹ Over the last hundred years academic attitudes have certainly shifted, but although many syair manuscripts have been transcribed, often by students completing degrees in departments of Indonesian and Malay studies, translations and annotations are relatively few. Historians have always been more comfortable using prose hikayat (which can similarly cover a range of topics), especially when these are supported by additional (normally European) material. Admittedly, poetry is more difficult than prose to render into another language, but apart from those that deal with ‘real’ events — the Syair Perang Mengkasar is a prime example — historians have found syair difficult to use.Footnote ³⁰ Romantic syair, like those which form the focus of Victorious wives, have been dismissed as trivial compositions of little literary merit and thus undeserving of attention. Despite the early recognition of Malay love of allegory and verbal play, particularly in relation to hidden meanings implicit in stories involving animal, bird and flower characters,Footnote ³¹ the sophisticated manner in which syair could serve as metaphors for events otherwise difficult to discuss openly has only recently been seriously explored. Taking one poet's comment that the ‘outer skin and content are different from each other’ seriously, Henk Maier and Gijs Koster have shown how Syair ikan terubuk, where the protagonists comprise various species of fish, can be interpreted as a satire on a war in 1761 between two Siak princes.Footnote ³² In a similar vein, the Syair Raja Tedung dan Raja Katak (Poem of the Cobra King and the Frog King) parodies the way in which Malay rulers accommodated the demands of Bugis adventurers in the first half of the eighteenth century.Footnote ³³

By introducing gender into these more sophisticated readings, Mulaika's elegantly written book has brought the discussion of syair to an entirely new level. Excellent translations, including an appendix of long excerpts, provide solid support for her interpretation and I have little doubt that Victorious wives will become a standard citation in any discussion of Malay literature. In many respects the six syair on which her discussions are based (Syair Siti Zuhrah, Syair Sultan Yahya, Syair Siti Zubaidah, Syair Sultan Abdul Muluk, Syair Siti Dhawiyyah, Syair Saudagar Bodoh) share much in common, most particularly the fact that these invariably beautiful heroines disguise themselves as men. Assuming a new persona, they captain ships, embark on travels to foreign lands, survive all manner of tribulations, achieve victory in battle (often with the aid of magical items), become great kings, wise scholars and successful traders. Possessed of intelligence, discernment, and religious piety, they successfully deal with palace intrigue, the antagonism of stepmothers and the rivalry of other women. Yet despite their mastery of innumerable dangers and obstacles, despite their intellectual and spiritual prowess which enable them to perform amazing tasks, they all return to become submissive and dutiful wives. In other words, though they challenge the prevailing gender order that affirms male superiority, they ultimately accept it.

In exploring these poems, four of which can be confidently ascribed to women, Mulaika does not attempt to draw connections to historical events, and is not adopting a triumphalist tone of ‘women were here too!’. Rather, she approaches the syair as ‘complex literary texts’, affording a glimpse into the fictive world of the culture that produced them (p. 11). Studying the romantic syair genre, she argues, not only provides a unique opportunity to explore the ‘inner life and imaginative possibilities’ available to composers and consumers in the nineteenth-century Malay world, but offers some understanding of women's preoccupations and concerns.

The great strength of Victorious wives is its foundation in a wide reading of secondary literature and a deep familiarity with the many syair that have survived through nineteenth-century publications. Despite the British creation of ‘Malayistics’ and their appropriation of Malay literature, the Anglo–Dutch Treaty of 1824 had assigned the Riau-Lingga archipelago, the heart of the old Johor kingdom, to the Dutch sphere of influence and allowed for its incorporation into the Netherlands East Indies. Here the Dutch amassed a very large collection of Malay manuscripts.Footnote ³⁴ At least four of the six syair Mulaika has chosen for closer examination emanated from the small island of Penyengat, a short boat-ride from the Dutch administrative capital of Tanjung Pinang on Riau itself.

Penyengat is probably best known because of the religious and literary influence of its most famous son, the scholar Raja Ali Haji (1808–70), but in recent years our knowledge of the wider environment has substantially expanded.Footnote ³⁵ In particular, the women of Penyengat, all descended from intermarriage between prestigious Bugis migrants and Johor Malay royalty, are known to have been actively involved in the production of manuscripts, particularly syair. However, Mulaika argues that although Bugis women are known for their literary connections, Penyengat was probably not exceptional. A useful appendix of female authors and copyists demonstrates (p. 181) that texts by and for women could be found all over the Malay world. Women wrote letters, acted as teachers, owned texts, commissioned, composed and copied manuscripts, and operated in a textually-aware world that was encouraged by Islamic attention to reading and recitation (pp. 37–47). As Mulaika says, this environment appears to be markedly different from that in Bali, where Helen Creese concluded that Balinese kakawin were written by men, that any tradition of women's writing appears to be ‘irretrievably’ lost, and that the kakawin view of women is essentially male.Footnote ³⁶

What Bali and the Malay areas do have in common is the fact that romantic texts were largely addressed to a female audience, a fact that should come as no surprise to scholars of Asian literature. Polygamous marriages and large domestic establishments led to a preponderance of women in elite households, and their limited access to the outside world encouraged and even necessitated a female orientation to most activities. In Islamic societies among the best-documented accounts of this gendered environment come from large and powerful courts, like that of the Ottomans or the Mughals, but closer to home there are other references to court entertainment where women of necessity took the roles of men.Footnote ³⁷ A VOC envoy in Banjarmasin in 1756, for instance, was entertained with a ‘comedie’ about ‘wars and love affairs’ in which the richly dressed and bejewelled characters were all played by leading court women, including the wife of the Crown Prince.Footnote ³⁸ Such occasions reflect a long tradition of women taking the part of men in dance drama, no doubt encouraged by texts like the immensely popular Panji tales where disguise (by both men and women) builds on yet more disguise and where the plot often hangs on mistaken identity. Reputedly introduced by Malay maids into the Thai court in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, the Panji cycle was transposed into texts expressly for performance by the Lakon Nai, the court dance-drama performed by women (p. 51).Footnote ³⁹

Women who took on a male role and dressed as men, like the pirate Ratu Mas, the formidable widow of Raja Haji of Riau (d. 1784), or female guards from the Javanese court who wore full male battle dress, can certainly be located in Southeast Asian sources.Footnote ⁴⁰ The romantic syair from Penyengat, however, should not be approached as a representation of reality. Because they were chanted aloud by specialists, they are better imagined in terms of a theatrical performance.Footnote ⁴¹ Raja Ali Haji himself believed that a syair could only be fully appreciated when it was accompanied by music, with melodious reading akin to singing.Footnote ⁴² The power of the human voice to generate emotion (pp. 70–1) is probably most graphically rendered in the great Malay epic, Hikayat Hang Tuah, which describes the extraordinary paralinguistic power exercised by Hang Tuah's companion, Hang Jebat, as he reads a story to the Melaka ruler and the palace women.Footnote ⁴³ The growing field of sensory history is a reminder that scholars world-wide have devalued the vocal aspects of history. As Francis Bacon (1561–1626) put it, hearing ‘striketh the spirits more immediately than the other senses’. Footnote ⁴⁴ The advance of literacy and the advent of print by no means destroyed the ballad tradition in early modern Europe; on the contrary, because reading and singing aloud from books and pamphlets was still commonplace, it helped bridge the gap between those skilled in reading and those who were not. Ballads, like syair, were still ‘a form of journalism’, an entertaining and accessible way of recording the past.Footnote ⁴⁵

As Mulaika so skilfully demonstrates, the emotions induced by performing a text and the actual task of writing are virtually inseparable. Indeed, a syair attributed to an exiled ruler of Palembang even tells his audience that ‘To sit brooding is unbearable/Ink and paper are the place to utter one's feelings’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the same mode, Victorious wives shows that the reciter/writer is herself involved in the emotional turmoil (rawan) that infuses the ‘heart-rending experience’ of copying or composing. In the words of Daeng Wuh, author of Syair Sultan Yahya, ‘the handwriting is terribly bad/But do not speak ill of it, noble youths/For much weighed on my mind/Standing and sitting at a loss/For my heart is unsettled/Enduring myriad torments …’ (pp. 85–6). One can also speculate that in places such as Riau the apprehension, even trepidation, of sitting down to write would have been sharpened because paper had to be imported and was always in short supply.Footnote ⁴⁷

When we turn to the syair themselves, we find that it is precisely these feelings of rawan that romantic heroines had to control, especially in their relationships with their families and with suitors and prospective husbands. They may be heartsick because of ill-treatment or false accusations, or face the discomfiture of a sexually compromising situation when in disguise, but although copious weeping is acceptable (heroines tend to cry a lot in syairs) more emotional displays of grief, anger, desire, jealousy, even joy, should be held in check. The heroine's repressed feelings should be articulated on her behalf by lesser women, such as attendants or nursemaids. In a specific focus on the Syair Siti Zuhrah and Syair Sultan Yahya (chap. 3) this control of emotion takes centre stage as the audience hears how heroines deal with difficult relationships, often with family members, in their path towards marriage. Their restraint, even in the face of improper advances and groundless allegations, helps restore order and bring events to an acceptable conclusion. This self-possession is in marked contrast to the behaviour of the male protagonists, whose uncontrolled emotions, frequently manifested in desire for a ‘man’ (i.e. a disguised princess), is fundamentally destabilising. The message is clear; exemplary women are those who successfully conceal their ‘inner turmoil’, regardless of the testing situations in which they are placed and the challenges posed to them by their relations with men.

Chapter 4 turns to a focused discussion of the Syair Sultan Abdul Muluk and Syair Siti Zubaidah, which are deployed to show how questions of gender identity become accentuated when disguised heroines enter domains associated with ‘maleness’, particularly the battlefield, a domain where men who fail to take up arms are persistently seen as woman-like. But the audience is forewarned that the heroines of these syair will perform ‘male-like’ deeds of great daring. In the Syair Sultan Abdul Muluk, for instance, the birth of Siti Rafiah, like that of legendary heroes, is signalled by heavy rains (pp. 111, 122). Compared to a ‘valiant man’, her behaviour is the complete obverse of the female-fertility-nurture association. Not only does she kill an innocent palace maid to counterfeit her own suicide, she has no compunction about murdering seven sleeping hunters. These actions are all taken in her long and laudable search for her husband; another heroine, Siti Zubaidah, similarly becomes a ‘man’ so that she can travel to China and do battle to rescue her husband from his captors, seven beautiful Chinese princesses. Like Siti Rafiah, Siti Zubaidah's marital fidelity and her submission to God are demonstrated by personal sacrifices such as her willingness to lay aside her maternal obligations and abandon her child in the forest. In keeping with the ideal of premarital chastity and marital fidelity, both heroines are prepared to accept a position as a co-wife, and their loyalty, piety and submission to fate, even when a husband is unfaithful, earns them the status of consort. It is worth noting, however, that the motif of the marriage bed as a battlefield, so common in Javanese and Balinese literature, receives only passing references in Riau syair, even though one character tells his adversaries, the Chinese princesses, ‘We ought to fight beneath the mosquito net/our krises and spears coaxes and caresses’ (p. 131).Footnote ⁴⁸ Presumably because of Islamic influences, the composer excuses herself from providing further details of sexual engagements, ‘The story will not be elaborated/for it's too difficult to find rhymes’ (pp. 131–3). A heroine may yearn for her beloved, but desire (nafsu) belongs only to lesser women and outsiders like the Chinese princesses. Momentarily challenged, the gender order returns to a settled state where ultimately the proper role for any woman is marriage and faithful wifehood.

Yet there are undercurrents, for in the final two syair (Syair Siti Dhalwiyyah and Syair Saudagar Bodoh) Mulaika tracks a different theme. The two heroines, Siti Dhawiyyah and Siti Zianah, are not princesses, but daughters of merchants, and for them marriage becomes a problem, since one husband is a philanderer and the other simply foolish. Entangled in difficult situations with other women or simply financially embarrassed, these men are depicted as less able than their more pious, astute and pragmatic wives, who ultimately rescue their husbands from disaster. The implicit message (reminiscent of episodes in Java's Serat Centini) is that men have ‘no monopoly on intelligence’ (akal), whether in the marketplace or the acquisition of religious knowledge.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is often women who help men attain akal, and the fact that Siti Dhawiyyah and Siti Zianah remain in their own homes and are presented as the only wife may represent a subtle acknowledgement of their superior intelligence. There are, however, words of caution. Female knowledge should not be directed towards the possession of wealth and material objects, or towards gaining access to love potions that exercise power over men. Hafsah, who seduces the hero through her mastery of spells and magic, is even executed, while other greedy and materialistic women receive due punishment through drowning or exposure (pp. 144, 148, 154, 165). The only akal of value is that which strengthens one's religious understanding or is of use in daily existence, and both wives maintain their loyalty to erring or incompetent husbands (even one, like Saudagar Bodoh, who was previously married and divorced 101 times before his union with Siti Zainah!).

In the twentieth century syair were still printed and copied, making a successful transition into popular Malay theatre and providing plots for a number of successful films.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nevertheless, Mulaika ends her book on a pessimistic note, for syair are rarely given serious attention in modern Malaysia. In 1926 Za'ba, regarded as the unassailable authority on Malay literature, remarked that ‘fairy tales and fantasies are unacceptable to the minds of the people in this age’ (p. 174). Like Raja Ali Haji, he believed that literary production should be directed towards education and moral benefit, not pleasure. Although the contemporary expansion of inexpensive, romantic novels in Indonesia and Malaysia may be derided by literary specialists, they deal with issues faced by Muslim women in contemporary society — polygamy, arranged marriages, single motherhood, family relationships, affairs of the heart. As with the nineteenth-century syair, the efflorescence of this genre attests a demand for stories that not only entertain, but speak to the preoccupations, concerns, and above all, the emotions of their audiences.Footnote ⁵¹

In turning to the third book in this review, we move from court records and literary representations of female experiences to a unique archive of personal letters by women themselves, in this case the four sisters of the Indonesian national heroine, Raden Kartini (1879–1904): Roekmini (1880–1951), Kartinah (1883–?), Kardinah (1881–1971) and Soematri (1888–1963). This corpus, including the originals of letters from Kartini, was presented to the Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in 1986 by the descendants of Jacques Abendanon (Director of Native Education, Religion and Industry, 1900–05), whose wife, the Spanish-born Rosita Abendanon-Mandri, was the primary recipient. Joost Coté's publication of Kartini's unexpurgated letters to her friend and mentor, Rosita, as well as to her pen-friend, the Dutch activist Stella Zeehandelaar, has been an important contribution to the field, especially for those interested in the complex interaction between tradition, modernity, nationalism and gender.Footnote ⁵² It is sometimes forgotten, however, that Kartini was one of eleven children (five daughters and six sons), among whom Roekmini and Kartinah were full sisters, born of the official consort, while the mother of Kartini, Kardinah and Soematri was the daughter of a local Kyai. Of their five brothers the sisters were closest to Raden Mas Sosro Kartono (1877–1951).

This volume, documenting correspondence mainly between Rosita and Kartini's sisters (as well as a few letters from husbands and several to other recipients) stretches from 1901 to 1951. It may be the final step in bringing together all that we know of this extraordinary group of young Javanese women. Although there are gaps in the correspondence, and it remains one-sided (since letters from Rosita have not survived), it will be a treasure trove for research in a wide number of fields. Probably only those who have themselves undertaken translation and editing of a large text can appreciate the time that Coté has invested in preparing these letters for publication, particularly in compiling the meticulous footnotes that draw connections, explain events, and identify names and places. The introduction to the book, a free-standing essay in itself, provides details on matters such as the family background, the relationship between the sisters, the recipients of the letters, and the political environment, including early expressions of Javanese nationalism. Coté points to some of the themes that draw the letters together, such as ideas about progress, education, travel and modernity, and each body of letters is preceded by a short overview of the writer's life.

Coté also addresses the issue of letters as a historical source (of which, incidentally, future historians will be largely deprived because of the advent of email and other forms of electronic communication). All the sisters wrote excellent Dutch, and their letters consistently demonstrate their extremely warm relationship with Rosita, who quickly moved from ‘Mevrouw’ to a maternal ‘Moedertje’. Her home in the Netherlands became a gathering place for Indonesian students, for whom she and her husband were often a source of financial support. For several years a particular recipient of their generosity was the widowed Roekmini and her children. The most striking feature of the letters is probably the outpouring of emotion (Coté speaks of ‘intensity’, p. 18) which is at times so palpable that they read like a personal diary. As we know, the initial publication of Kartini's letters, Door duisternis tot licht (From darkness to light) in 1911 was carefully edited, with some of the more critical and personal comments omitted. Annie Glaser, who was employed as teacher for the two elder sisters, in fact refused to allow publication of their correspondence (p. 323). There is no indication that the sisters ever thought that their own letters might appear in print, but they were aware that their communications were not necessarily private. Husbands sometimes read letters, and those to Rosita often conveyed messages to be passed on to the influential Jacques Abendanon in hopes of advancing their own plans or the careers of their menfolk. It is hardly necessary to point out that letter-writing is always a matter of self-representation and thus a type of performance. For instance, Roekmini's brave comments to Rosita contrast with her frank admission to another Indonesian activist, Etty Wawo Runto from Minahassa, that her school had attracted little support and received scant encouragement. Letters from Kartinah and Soematri to their Dutch friend Lien van den Berge-Kelder in Padang (pp. 235, 250, 260) assume a more casual and ‘chatty’ tone. Soematri's confessions of her secret romance with her husband-to-be and the exchange of gossip about mutual acquaintances are quite different from the more sober and increasingly thoughtful nature of her correspondence with Rosita. Yet even at their frankest, some questions, like sexual relationships, are never addressed, so that marriage is presented primarily as a meeting of minds and common interests.

The rich detail these letters provide may lead readers to forget that they were often accompanied by gifts which could be as meaningful as the written word. For the four sisters the objects and pictures sent by Rosita became deeply evocative sites of memory. A fan, a postcard of Niagara Falls, a ‘very precious water jug’ — the exchange of pictures and objects, like letters, became part of a complex chain of remembered interaction that (as Soematri remarked in 1936), meant that the link between her family and their Moerdertje ‘can never be washed away, but will be passed on to their children as a talisman’ (p. 299). In these exchanges the visuality of photographs (several included here were obtained from the Abendanon family) played a special role. Of course, both senders and receivers understood that at one level photographs were staged and in that sense a pale reflection of the true self. Commenting on one of the most well-known pictures of herself with Roekmini and Kardinah, the sisterly ‘cloverleaf’, Kartini thus remarked: ‘How do you like our photograph — is it not frightfully conceited? There we are showing ourselves as Regent's daughters. You had not thought, had you that your friends could be so prim — or be such proud little things’.Footnote ⁵³ Nonetheless, frequent references not merely to photographs, but to the emotions attached to them, reveal the power of a technology which we now take completely for granted. Roekmini thus offers to send Rosita a medallion containing a photograph of Kartini ‘like the one I always wear’ (p. 102). On her writing table ‘where I spend so many days’ is a ‘group photo’ of Rosita, her husband and their sons (Rosita's step-sons) in front of their house ‘which I look at so often’ (p. 111). Kartinah and Soematri yearn for such a ‘precious souvenir’, and when one arrives, says Kartinah ‘it has made me so happy … I am fondly gazing into your eyes that seem to be telling me something’ (p. 245).

Although the volume includes years of correspondence from all four sisters, the most complete archive is from Roekmini, who was the closest in age and spirit to Kartini. Marrying relatively late at the age of 28, she was able (unlike Kardinah and Kartini) to choose her own husband, a relatively low-level civil servant. Through well over a hundred pages of letters that date from 1901 to 1921, we are witness to her loyalty to the ideals she and Kartini had shared, her commitment to working for girls’ education, her engagement with women's affairs, her belief in Java's future, but above all, her strength in the face of adversity, disappointment and bereavement — widowhood, financial difficulties, the deaths of her two daughters, problems with her stepson. Now publicly available, these letters should elevate the little-known Roekmini to a significant place in the early Indonesian women's movement, expressed even in her feminisation of the fate that left her alone after the weddings of Kardinah and Kartini. ‘Reality,’ she wrote, ‘was wise, since She only meant to show us what life had in store for us by giving us the illusion of being free agents’ (p. 90).

It is therefore appropriate that Coté has chosen Roekmini's letters to open the ‘narrative’ (repeating a few previously published letters) at a critical point in 1901, when the ‘cloverleaf’ was broken because of Kardinah's arranged marriage. Over a hundred years later, we can still feel Roekmini's horror at this development: ‘they have pushed her to the extremity … my heart is breaking … they have murdered our souls’ (pp. 56–7). Kartini and Roekmini recover, and make plans to go to Europe to study, and when this is frustrated by colonial disapproval and parental opposition, they reorient themselves to Batavia. Again, these plans are brought to naught in 1903 when Kartini complies with the wishes of her parents, and herself agrees to marry a man of their choice. While the outpourings of Kartini on the subject of arranged marriage are well-known, here we are introduced to the reactions of her closest companions. For Roekmini, ‘The cross which our darling must carry is heavy,’ and on the wedding day ‘we looked deeply into each other's eyes … recognized … our farewell to the past’ (pp. 72–9). Needless to say, the unexpected death of Kartini was agonising for all the sisters, but it seems that the correspondence with Rosita allowed them to express their feelings in a way that was not possible with their own mothers. Roekmini herself says they must maintain appearances, and this control of emotion, so reminiscent of Mulaika's heroines, is especially evident in Kardinah's acceptance of her marriage as a filial duty. ‘How hard it is to walk over the ruins of what were once my beautiful ideals with my head held calmly and proudly erect … I pretend to everyone that he was my choice’ (p. 189).

Throughout the letters there are certain recurring themes, the foremost of which, as the title suggests, concerns the shared goal of ‘realizing the dream of Kartini’, the promotion of female education. Roekmini's 1929 report, announcing ‘the first women's congress’ the year before, is a testimony to her continuing involvement. The school she had opened with Kartini in Jepara eventually foundered because of financial difficulties, but she remained closely connected with initiatives to establish schools for native girls. After a gap of several years it may have been the receipt of Door duisternis tot licht that lay behind Kardinah's resumption of correspondence with Rosita and her announcement that she would establish a vocational school for girls in Tegal. Eventually opened in 1916, ‘Wismo Pranowo’ (the house that expands the vision) provided Dutch and Malay language training, but used Javanese as the medium of instruction, was community-supported, and was limited to females, unlike the coeducational native schools. It was thus rather different from, for instance, the European-sponsored Kartini Fund school in Semarang. The following year Kardinah could write that ‘girls’ schools are now starting to spring up like toadstools’ and the establishment of institutions for the training of native female teachers was seen as a great step forward (p. 209). Two decades later the expansion of women's education seemed quite remarkable. Soematri, recalling Rosita's first visit to Jepara, when she herself was only twelve, wrote, ‘it is unbelievable how much has been achieved in such a short time. We now already have our female doctors, our lawyers. People no longer question whether they should send their daughters to school’ (p. 299).

In their pursuit of Kartini's dream, the sisters relied heavily on the encouragement and assistance of other liberal individuals, both Javanese and European. They formed strong bonds with a circle of Dutch-educated ‘native girlfriends’, including the Pakualaman princess of Yogyakarta, and with like-minded European women. Probably more importantly, they received significant assistance from several influential Dutch men, especially Jacques Abendanon. It also seems that their husbands were generally supportive, although Kartinah's letters to Rosita ceased after her marriage, and Soematri's husband went so far as to predict that ‘it will be tens of years even before our female teachers will be ready to teach even our girls’ (p. 280). But at the same time the letters point to real opposition, not only from sceptical colonial officials, but to powerful Javanese men, like their uncle, the Regent of Demak. While less vehement than Kartini's condemnation, the sisters still deplored male indifference to their campaign. In Kartinah's words, ‘The situation in the Netherlands Indies regarding the education of our girls remains miserable … Who would dare to suggest that Javanese women do not feel the need for more knowledge and new skills? … Yet among our most highly educated male countrymen there are still some who continue to dare to hold to this view’ (pp. 140, 225, 251–2).

There were other aspects of Kartini's dream that continued to receive her sisters’ attention, such as support for Javanese handicrafts, but their early involvement in nationalist activities is of particular interest. The ‘Call to Young Java’ of 1908 (signed by Roekmini, Kartinah and Soematri), their initial involvement with Budi Utomo — ‘May it be a support for us in many ways!’ (p. 225) — and the belief that ‘we Javanese’ must take the helm in the road to ‘progress’ place them firmly within the framework of the national story. Yet it is evident that any vision of ‘our nation’ beyond Java itself remained vague. The Women's Union of 1928 was headed by Javanese, and although Roekmini corresponded with the Minahassan educator Etty Wawo Runto, and Kardinah's school had connections with Aceh and Lampung, educated women beyond Java apparently remained outside their circle, like ‘that girl’ (actually the Ambonese Leentje Jacomina Tehupeiory), who went to the Netherlands to study pharmacy. On one occasion Soematri explicitly tells her friend Lien that although she might be amenable to her husband's posting in Padang or Bali. ‘I very much hope that we will never have to go to the Outer Islands’ (p. 41). Despite Cora Vreede-de Stuers perception of ‘the unity of Indonesian women’, the sisters seemed unaware of the modernist Muslim schools educating girls as well as boys that had been developed in Padang as early as 1909, or even in Bali from the 1920s.Footnote ⁵⁴ What concerned them most was Java.

By the 1930s, when the correspondence essentially ends, we have moved into a new era, so that the life of Soematri was very different from that of her elder sister Roekmini. In 1932 the younger woman thus wrote, ‘Much has changed in Java, the surroundings, and everything which together actually we call the world.’ Twenty years later Kardinah similarly spoke of a ‘new world’ in which the younger generation must find their way (pp. 296, 213). But despite the far-reaching changes that the sisters had personally witnessed, one constant theme, from the very first letter to the last, is their concern about relationships with the male members of their family. Kartini and Kardinah agreed to arranged marriages to comply with the wishes of their beloved father; Roekmini's hopes of a career in a bank or as a teacher are blocked by her uncle, the Regent of Demak; Kartinah would have liked training in needlework, but dared not mention it to her parents; after Kartini's death the sisters were unable to forge any relationship with her son because of opposition from her husband and his family; the son himself showed no signs of inheriting his mother's talents; Soedjono, the widowed Roekmini's underachieving stepson, was a financial and emotional burden; the sisters worried about promotion possibilities for their civil-service husbands, minor figures in a larger colonial machine that often overlooked talented Javanese. But the great disappointment was the failure of their brother Sosro Kartono to achieve academic and political advancement in the Netherlands, despite his impressive beginnings in Java. Though Coté sees him as a victim of modernity, Kartini expressed the frustration and anxiety all the sisters felt at these lost opportunities: ‘He was my best, most loyal friend, my adviser and my guide — he didn't study, he lived it up … he has been in Holland for four years and he has still not achieved anything.’Footnote ⁵⁵ In the end, it was the bonds between women that held the family together, no better captured than in Soematri's description of their vacation together in Salatiga in 1935: ‘Roekmini, Kardinah, Kartinah and I, just like the old days, looking for the comfort of our own family and home, together also with our two mothers’ (pp. 297–8).