About Medan Prijaji

Medan Prijaji

Medan Prijaji, in modern Indonesian spelling Medan Priyayi, was a Malay-language newspaper in the Dutch East Indies founded and operated in Bandung by Tirto Adhi Soerjo between 1907 and 1912. Its name meant Aristocrat's Forum. Although it was short-lived, it was considered the first newspaper of the Indonesian National Awakening, and it has been widely recognised as the first truly Indonesian newspaper, because it was owned and operated by native Indonesians — with native reporters, editors and printers — and its target audience was likewise native, at a time when newspapers in the Indies had existed since Bataviase Nouvelles in 1744 but were European or Indo-owned. It inspired the creation of a number of other anti-colonial Malay newspapers, the Dutch authorities closed it in 1912, and its founder's life later became the basis for the Buru Quartet of historical novels by Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

Tirto Adhi Soerjo before Medan Prijaji

Tirto Adhi Soerjo was born Raden Mas Djokomono, around 1880, to a priyayi, or noble Javanese, family in Blora, Central Java. He was raised by his grandparents, whose relationship with the Dutch colonists was strained after his grandfather Tirtonoto had been deposed as regent by a Dutch-backed man. He nevertheless attended Europeesche Lagere School, schools for European youth, in Bojonegoro, Rembang and Madiun, and graduated in 1894. That year he began to dabble in journalism, writing correspondence for the Malay-language daily Hindia Olanda; he received no honorarium, but was given free newspapers when his work was published.

In Batavia he studied at STOVIA, the School for Training Native Physicians, an unusual choice for a student of noble descent, who would normally have attended the school for future government employees. He spent six years there, taking three years of preparatory courses followed by medical studies, but left without graduating. Accounts of his leaving differ: Tirto wrote that he had failed an examination needed to graduate because he had been too busy writing for Hindia Olanda to study, while Pramoedya Ananta Toer's biography of him says he was caught giving a prescription to a Chinese woman while not yet qualified, leading to his expulsion. Either way, journalism, not medicine, became his profession.

Early journalism, Soenda Berita and the first exile

On leaving STOVIA in 1900 Tirto remained in journalism. In 1902 he became an editor of the Batavia-based daily Pembrita Betawi, working concurrently as an assistant editor for Warna Sari and as a correspondent for the Surakarta-based Bromartani. His column Dreyfusiana, named for the Dreyfus affair then unfolding in France, contained heated criticism of the Dutch colonial government and the misuse of power — themes that remained common in his writing after he left the newspaper in 1903.

Later in 1903 he established his own newspaper, Soenda Berita, aimed mainly at native readers but also catering to ethnic Chinese and Indos to attract advertising revenue. The Malaysian historian Ahmat Adam calls Soenda Berita the first native-owned newspaper in the Indies. It was not long-lasting: after a breach of trust case in which Tirto was accused of stealing an accessory, he was exiled to Bacan in 1904. There he befriended the sultan, Muhammad Sidik Syah, and on 8 February 1906 he married the sultan's daughter, Raja Fatimah. The pattern of his later career — a newspaper, a prosecution, an exile — was already set before Medan Prijaji existed.

Founding in Bandung with Sarekat Priyayi

After returning to Java in 1906, Tirto began plans for a new Malay-language newspaper, working with various priyayi and merchants. They first united as the Sarekat Priyayi in 1906, and the following year Tirto launched Medan Prijaji, a weekly based in Bandung, in West Java. He advertised the new newspaper as a voice for the kings, native nobles, and thoughts of native traders. The organisation, Sarekat Prijaji in the spelling used by some sources, failed, but the newspaper was going strong and gaining fame across the whole Dutch East Indies.

The name of the paper implied that Tirto intended it as a discussion forum for the priyayi, the Javanese lower aristocracy who were at that time participating in the Dutch civil service and obtaining European educations because of the Dutch Ethical Policy. His healthy subscription numbers pushed him to obtain additional investment in 1908 from wealthy priyayi and Indonesian Chinese backers. A Bandung foundation gave the paper a base outside the colonial capital, Batavia, in a city that was becoming a centre of native education, publishing and organisation — and the paper's fame, its contemporaries recorded, reached well beyond its first city.

A militant and sarcastic style

Historian Takashi Shiraishi wrote that Tirto created his own journalistic style in Medan Prijaji, militant and sarcastic in tone, and that the paper was no longer a forum for only the priyayi, but, as its motto said, the voice for all the native rulers, aristocrats and intellectuals, priyayi, native merchants and officers, as well as merchants of the subordinated peoples made equal in status with the Sons of the Country. The expanded motto is important: a paper named for aristocrats deliberately widened its claimed constituency to the subordinated peoples as a whole, made equal with the children of the country.

An Indonesian academic study of the paper likewise concluded that Medan Prijaji became a forum for criticism and aspirations for the Indonesian people in the struggle for independence, that through it Tirto used the press to voice the opinions and thoughts of the nation, and that its presence was able to give rise to many new presses and newspapers that educated readers and fuelled the nation's spirit to rise as an independent nation. The study treats the paper as the first bumiputera-owned newspaper with a major influence in spreading the spirit of struggle, and its birth as the starting point for the use of native newspapers openly against the colonial government, displacing an earlier function of the native press as a tool of information alone.

Companion publications and organising

During the Medan Prijaji period Tirto established two smaller publications, Soeloeh Keadilan and the woman-oriented Poetri Hindia. A newspaper aimed at women readers, published by the same hand as a militant political weekly, shows the breadth of the publishing project around the main title: political criticism, justice, and a native women's readership were all part of the same attempt to build a native public sphere in print. Poetri Hindia's existence also underlines that Medan Prijaji was the centre of a small publishing enterprise, not a single isolated sheet.

Tirto's organising ran alongside his publishing. He founded Sarekat Dagang Islamiyah, the Islamic Commercial Union, in Batavia in 1909 and in Buitenzorg, now Bogor, in 1910, an organisation designed to support Indonesian traders, with the word Islam in its name serving to unite the majority Muslim Indonesian traders under the banner of religion. Its Surabaya branch was founded by H. O. S. Tjokroaminoto, who took over the leadership of the organisation as a whole and changed its name to Sarekat Islam — the mass movement that transformed Indies politics from 1912. The newspaper, the traders' organisation and the later movement belonged to one connected world of native association in which Tirto was an initiator.

Imprisonment and the criticism that defined the paper

Tirto continued to criticise Dutch policies in Medan Prijaji, becoming increasingly explicit, and one case in 1909 led to him being imprisoned for two months. Criticism of the government and promotion of a nationalist ideology were dangerous at the time, and numerous writers had spent time in prison for expressing their disdain for colonialism. The paper's willingness to print such criticism, under a native editor who had already been exiled once in his career, was what distinguished it from the commercial Malay press that had preceded it.

The criticism was also practical in its targets. The early Dreyfusiana columns in Pembrita Betawi had attacked the misuse of power, and the studies of Medan Prijaji describe a paper used as a medium for the aspirations of the native people against colonialism and for education. Awareness of the importance of education for the nation, one study notes, began to grow with the Ethical Policy, which produced educated natives who in turn produced works — newspapers among them — to generate awareness for the struggle for independence. Medan Prijaji both came from that educated class and addressed itself to enlarging it.

The move to Batavia and life as a daily

In 1910 Tirto moved Medan Prijaji to Batavia and made it a daily. The first edition in the new format was published on 5 October 1910; by that time the paper had around 2,000 subscribers. He continued to write staunch criticisms of the Dutch colonial government and advertised the newspaper as an organ for the subjugated people in the Dutch East Indies and a place for the native voices. The front page of the paper from 2 April 1910, preserved and reproduced in histories of the paper, dates from the last months of its Bandung weekly period, just before that transformation.

The change from a Bandung weekly to a Batavia daily was an escalation in every sense: more frequent confrontation with the censor and the courts, a place in the capital's daily news cycle, and a subscription base counted in thousands. It lasted a little over a year in that form. Tirto and Medan Prijaji were able to last until 1912, when the Dutch closed the paper; the last issue was printed on 3 January 1912, and Tirto was sent back to Bacan, the island of his first exile. He died on 7 December 1918, in Batavia, in the hotel he formerly owned, Hotel Medan Prijaji, which by then had already been auctioned by Goenawan, an old friend of his — a building that carried his newspaper's name.

Why historians call it the first Indonesian newspaper

Medan Prijaji has been widely recognised as the first truly Indonesian newspaper, although the medium had been present in the area since Bataviase Nouvelles was established in 1744. The distinction rests on ownership, staffing and audience: it was owned and operated by native Indonesians, including native reporters, editors and printers, and its target audience was likewise native. Earlier Malay and vernacular papers had involved native people largely in production roles, while ownership and editorial control rested with Europeans, Indos or Chinese publishers. Medan Prijaji broke that pattern, and its birth is treated in Indonesian press history as the opening of the final, native-owned period of the colonial press.

It is also considered the first newspaper of the Indonesian National Awakening, the period of early twentieth-century native organisation and consciousness from which the independence movement grew. Press and organisation developed together in those years: Tirto created Sarekat Prijaji and its organ Medan Prijaji in 1906–07, Wahidin Soedirohoesodo created Boedi Oetomo in 1908, Douwes Dekker founded the Indische Partij in 1912 while editing De Expres, and Tjokroaminoto was editor-in-chief of Oetoesan Hindia as he took up the leadership of Sarekat Islam. Medan Prijaji stood at the head of that sequence, and it inspired the creation of a number of other anti-colonial Malay newspapers that followed its example.

Legacy in journalism, literature and public memory

Syafik Umar, a senior reporter at the Bandung-based daily Pikiran Rakyat, wrote that Medan Prijaji laid the framework for modern journalism in Indonesia, citing its layout and its nationalistic creed, which differed from the earlier Dutch- and Indo-owned works. Journalist Sudarjo Tjokosisworo described Tirto as the first Indonesian journalist to use the media to shape public opinion. The educator Ki Hajar Dewantara praised Tirto's sharp insights, and others have considered Tirto's work in the media, together with that of Dewantara and Agus Salim, as forging a national identity, a necessary precursor to independence.

For his writings Tirto was declared a Press Hero in 1973, and he was made a National Hero of Indonesia on 3 November 2006 for outstanding contributions to the nation. In his history of Indonesia, M. C. Ricklefs describes Tirto as the father of Indonesian journalism. In literature, Minke, the main character of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet, was based on Tirto: like Tirto, Minke was born in Blora, wrote extensive polemics against the Dutch and established a newspaper named Medan Priyayi as a vehicle for his political views before being sent into exile. Pramoedya also wrote a non-fiction book about Tirto's rise and fall, Sang Pemula, The Initiator. An Indonesian news website, Tirto.id, is named in his honour, and on 10 November 2021 the government of Bogor gave a street in the city the name R. M. Tirto Adhi Soerjo. The paper itself survived only from 1907 to 1912, but the judgement of Indonesian journalism on those five years has never been reversed.