About Pewarta Deli

Pewarta Deli

Pewarta Deli was a Malay-language newspaper published in Medan, on the east coast of Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies, from 1910 until 1941, and again briefly from 1945 to 1946. Its name meant Deli Reporter; Deli was the original name of the city of Medan. During its run the paper became a strident anti-colonial voice, sympathetic to Sarekat Islam and to Indonesian nationalism and critical of the cruelty of big business in Medan's tobacco and plantation industries. It also gave space in its pages to communism and to Islamic modernism. It had a wide readership in its time, with an influence not only in the Indies but also among Malays in British Malaya, and it may have reached its peak in the 1930s, when it was one of the most-read Malay newspapers in the Indies.

Founding in Medan in January 1910

Pewarta Deli was first published in Medan, North Sumatra, in January 1910. It was founded by Radja Endar Moeda, a Muslim Batak who had worked as a schoolteacher and journalist and who had founded, edited and directed newspapers and journals since the nineteenth century, including Pertja Barat, Insulinde and Pemberita Atjeh. The paper was owned by Sjarikat Tapanoeli, a company Endar Moeda had recently cofounded in Medan with some Batak businessmen and Peranakan Chinese investors — a mixed Batak and Chinese ownership typical of the new native press in multi-ethnic Medan.

Aside from Medan, the newspaper also had a ready market in Aceh, which at that time did not have its own newspaper. Medan itself was the administrative and commercial centre of the Deli plantation belt, where tobacco estates and the labour systems that worked them generated both the wealth of the region and many of the injustices the paper would report. A Malay-language daily founded by a Batak journalist, financed locally and read as far as Aceh gave the east coast of Sumatra a native newspaper of its own at a moment when the native press was still concentrated in Java.

Reorganisation in 1911 and the Parlindoengan editorship

Endar Moeda's tenure did not last. He seems to have had disputes with the owners of the newspaper, and in 1911 the paper was reorganised: Haji Mohamed Tahir, a clerk for the magnate Tjong A Fie, took over as director, and Endar Moeda left Medan for Aceh. In 1912 Soetan Parlindoengan became Pewarta Deli's new editor-in-chief. Mangaradja Soeangkoepon, who became better known after 1927 as a member of the Volksraad, the colonial people's council, briefly worked for the paper in 1915 as well.

The change of control did not soften the paper. Under Parlindoengan it acquired the legal history that marked its early decades: the editor was charged several times in 1918 under the strict Dutch censorship laws. A newspaper whose director came from the office of Medan's greatest Chinese magnate, and whose editor was repeatedly prosecuted, occupied an exposed middle ground in the city's politics — commercially connected, editorially combative, and answerable to a colonial legal system that treated printed criticism as an offence.

A voice against the plantation order

Pewarta Deli became a strident anti-colonial voice, sympathetic to Sarekat Islam and Indonesian nationalism and critical of the cruelty of big business in Medan's tobacco and plantation industries, and it gave space in its pages to communism and Islamic modernism. Tengkoe Fachroeddin, a Muslim modernist and Sarekat Islam activist who joined the paper as an editor, used his platform to criticise all the injustices he saw in the city: discrimination in official posts, the unethical procurement of sex workers, the cruel excesses of the native elite, and abuses taking place on plantations in North Sumatra.

That range of subjects defined the paper's character. It attacked the colonial government, the plantation companies and the native elite at the same time, and it combined Islamic modernist reform with sympathy for the wider nationalist movement. In a plantation city built on contract labour, reporting abuses on the estates was not abstract politics but coverage of the central industry of the region and of the conditions of the workers on whom it depended. Fachroeddin's campaigns against discrimination in official posts likewise spoke directly to educated native readers who were themselves excluded from those posts.

Limits of its radicalism and the censorship courts

There were also limits to the paper's discourse. Pewarta Deli fired one of its editors, Ismael, in 1920, for defending the right to strike too vigorously in the pages of the paper. The dismissal is a revealing episode: a newspaper critical of plantation cruelty nevertheless drew a line at open advocacy of strikes, the one tactic that directly threatened the estates' labour system and the paper's own commercial position in the city that system sustained.

The recurring legal troubles came from outside. Dutch censorship laws were strict, and the paper's editors met them repeatedly: Parlindoengan's several charges in 1918 were followed by cases against his successors for more than a decade. In the early 1920s the writer R. K. Mangoen Atmodjo, editor at the paper Mardeka, was also a columnist at Pewarta Deli, evidence that the paper drew contributors from the wider world of the Sumatran Malay press even as its own editors rotated through the courts.

The editors of the 1920s

Maharadja Ihoetan took over as director and editor-in-chief of the paper in 1923. He occasionally ran into trouble with local authorities because of the censorship rules; at one point he was charged with insulting an official from Sibolga. Abdoel Hamid Loebis, an editor at the paper, was charged under the press censorship laws in a series of cases in 1928. Then, in late 1929, Mohamad Kanoen, who had previously been at Bintang Timur, became the new editor-in-chief. He almost immediately became involved in court cases as well, after publishing an article judged by officials to be anti-Dutch.

The sequence — a new editor in 1923, censorship charges in 1924, 1928 and 1929 — shows a newspaper whose editorial line survived its editors. Historian Nobuto Yamamoto's study of censorship in colonial Indonesia cites Pewarta Deli repeatedly in its account of how the colonial state policed the Malay press between 1901 and 1942. Each prosecution was a press delict case, reported in the Dutch-language newspapers of the Indies, so the paper's troubles are unusually well documented in the colonial press that was prosecuting its kind.

The Adinegoro era from 1931

The paper may have hit its peak of popularity in the 1930s, when it was one of the most-read Malay newspapers in the Indies, and it took on a more liberal-nationalist line during this era. Djamaluddin Adinegoro took over as head of the paper in 1931. His hiring was considered an impressive feat, as he was a highly educated and active man: a European-educated polyglot physician, political analyst and journalist who had served in government, was a relative of Mohammad Yamin, and had published a Malay-language dictionary and the bestselling memoir Melawat ke Barat, Journey to the West, drawn from his travels and journalism studies in Europe.

Adinegoro had left the medical school STOVIA because of his interest in becoming a reporter, worked as a voluntary assistant for newspapers in Utrecht, and studied journalism, geography, cartography and philosophy in Berlin, Munich and Würzburg. On his return to Indonesia in mid-1931 he worked at Balai Pustaka in Jakarta, led the magazine Pandji Pustaka and wrote for Bintang Timoer, before accepting the offer to lead Pewarta Deli in Medan. Under his leadership the paper improved and changed, not only in layout and news reporting but in the choice of articles. His reports on the war in Abyssinia and the civil war in Spain were accompanied by maps showing the location of the war, making the reports easier for readers to understand — at a time when attaching pictures or maps in a local newspaper was uncommon.

Adinegoro, the authorities and the law

In Pewarta Deli's editorials Adinegoro expressed his thoughts on colonialism, the struggle for independence, nationalism and education. His writing was sharp and elegant, and because of his skill in choosing words he repeatedly managed to escape the legal traps of the Dutch colonial press ordinance, the Persbreidel-Ordonantie. The colonial government was nevertheless always suspicious of him because of his activities in the nationalist movement. During his time as editor he regularly had problems with the Dutch authorities, being arrested or investigated repeatedly for things he printed in the paper, and he was accused of being a communist or an agent of the Soviet Union; Dutch newspaper reports in September 1932 recorded both arrests in connection with alleged links to Moscow and the lifting of police supervision over the paper's editor-in-chief.

The contrast with his predecessors is instructive. Earlier editors of Pewarta Deli had been charged repeatedly, and drawn into court cases, by what they printed; Adinegoro, trained in Europe and practised in phrasing, wrote editorials on independence that the censors watched constantly but found harder to prosecute. The paper's liberal-nationalist maturity in the 1930s rested in large part on that editorial craft, and his years in Medan are remembered in his biographies as a central chapter of his career as one of Indonesia's pioneering journalists.

The 1936 lockout dispute and the late 1930s paper

In 1936 Abdullah Loebis, the longtime director of Sjarikat Tapanoeli and of Pewarta Deli, fell into disagreement with the organisation and was removed and replaced by Haji Mohamad Kasim. After his forced resignation, Loebis had the offices of the newspaper locked and a guard posted, which caused a minor scandal; after the staff were able to enter the building through a back entrance, he was forced to have the locks removed. The episode, reported in the Batavia press in April 1936, showed the paper's internal ownership politics spilling into public view a quarter-century after its founding.

Through the decade the paper's reach extended beyond the Indies. It had a wide readership in its time, with an influence not only in the Indies but also among Malays in British Malaya, across the strait from Medan. Malay, the paper's language, was the lingua franca of the region, and a strident, well-edited Malay newspaper from the plantation coast could be read in Penang and Singapore as readily as in Medan and Aceh. That cross-straits readership was part of what made the paper, in the judgement of the histories that cite it, one of the significant Malay newspapers of the late colonial period.

Pewarta Deli in North Sumatra's independence press

A peer-reviewed discourse study of North Sumatran newspapers in the independence struggle, covering 1916 to 1925, places Pewarta Deli in a dense regional press landscape. From 1910 to 1925 there were 24 indigenous newspapers published in North Sumatra, of which 13 demanded Indonesian independence: Soeara Djawa, Pewarta Deli, Benih Merdeka, Perempoean Bergerak, Soeara Bondjol, Sinar Zaman, Orgaan Bataksche Studiefonds, Andalas, Mandailing, Warta Timur, Al Moektabas, Tjermin Karo and Soeara Batak. Analysing texts from those papers, the study found 51 articles demanding Indonesia's independence from Dutch colonialism, criticising the policies of the Dutch colonial government and building awareness of Indonesian nationalism.

Pewarta Deli was the oldest and longest-lived of that company, founded in 1910 before the study period even began and still publishing when most of the others had disappeared. The study's conclusion — that North Sumatran newspapers functioned not only as a medium of information but as a tool of the struggle for independence, carrying the spirit of nationalism and the concept of a nation to Indonesian readers — describes the role the paper had claimed for itself from its first decade, in its Sarekat Islam sympathy, its plantation reporting and its modernist editorials alike.

War, revival and destruction in 1945–46

The newspaper ceased publication during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies. During that time Adinegoro edited a Japanese-authorised paper called Sumatra Shimbun. As the war ended, Mohamed Said restarted Pewarta Deli, and it went to press in September 1945 with A. O. Loebis as editor-in-chief and Said as assistant editor. During the Indonesian National Revolution the paper, unsurprisingly in view of its whole history, took the side of the Indonesian nationalists against the Dutch and the British.

The revival was brief and ended physically. The paper's presses were destroyed by British soldiers in 1946, during the Allied occupation of Sumatra; the paper was unable to recover and never resumed publication. A newspaper that had survived the Dutch censorship courts of 1918, 1924, 1928 and 1929, the suspicions and arrests of the Adinegoro years and an internal lockout of its own offices was ended not by a court order but by the destruction of its printing machinery in the revolution it had supported. Its thirty-one years of publication, from January 1910 to 1941 and its short revolutionary afterlife in 1945–46, left it recorded in the standard history of the national press, Seabad pers kebangsaan, as one of the formative anti-colonial newspapers of Sumatra.