3 - Onghokham: Dissecting Indonesian Society

Onghokham lived a highly eccentric and hedonistic lifestyle, to the delight of some and the annoyance of others. At the same time, from the 1970s to about 2001, he was very much a public intellectual, the senior historian from Surabaya who wrote over 300 articles in Indonesia’s mainstream media. He came from an unusual background, now long swept away, from the great Chinese sugar lords of East Java, the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan elite of early modern Indonesia. He was a multiple-minority figure, of Chinese descent, Dutch educated, irreligious, pork-eating, alcoholic and gay, and it was that outsider status that gave him a particular angle of vision on Indonesian society. Looking back on his life, it is the breadth of themes in his writings that makes him stand out. Onghokham’s life is a fascinating study telling much about modern Indonesian politics and society, and that study is richly complemented by the range of his views on Indonesia’s past and its present. His core concepts were nation, power, structure, position - and the impact on them of socio-economic changes, and on the ways people lived and thought, from mighty rulers down to lowly marginal people. His writings open up new avenues and new narratives.