About Times of Indonesia

Times of Indonesia

The Times of Indonesia was a daily English-language newspaper published in Jakarta, Indonesia. Founded in 1952, it was described by the press historian David T. Hill as the first English daily newspaper in Indonesia, and it published for eight years before its publishing licence was revoked on 31 October 1960. The newspaper belonged to the small English-language press that served Jakarta's diplomatic, expatriate and internationally oriented readers in the first decade after Indonesian independence, and scholarly histories of the Indonesian press remembered it as one of the critical Jakarta dailies of the liberal democracy period. Because it was founded and then led by two of the most distinctive figures in early Indonesian journalism, Mochtar Lubis and Charles Tambu, its short life was closely documented in biographical and press-history scholarship.

Founding in 1952

The Times of Indonesia was founded in Jakarta in 1952. Hill's history of the press in New Order Indonesia, drawing on the record of the period, identified it as the first English daily newspaper in the country, a distinction repeated in later reference works and in accounts of Mochtar Lubis's career, one of which noted that in 1952 Lubis published the first English-language newspaper in Indonesia, the Times of Indonesia. The founding came at a moment when Jakarta's press was expanding rapidly under the comparatively open conditions of liberal democracy, when newspapers attached to parties, movements and individual editors competed closely and editors-in-chief, typically in their thirties and forties, set the direction of their publications. An English-language daily was a new undertaking in that market, since the established Jakarta press published overwhelmingly in Indonesian, alongside Chinese-language and remaining Dutch-language titles.

Mochtar Lubis as founding editor

The founding editor of the Times of Indonesia was Mochtar Lubis, who at the same time edited the Indonesian-language daily Indonesia Raya. Hill's critical biography of Lubis recorded that Lubis had close links to the army leadership, a connection noted by Herbert Feith in his study of the decline of constitutional democracy in Indonesia. Lubis's editorship of the Times was brief. In 1953, only a year after the founding, he stepped down from the newspaper because of the stresses of his simultaneous editorship of Indonesia Raya, according to Hill's biography. The handover was therefore a direct consequence of the double burden under which the newspaper had been launched, with its founder attempting to run an English-language daily alongside a major Indonesian-language title. Lubis himself remained a towering figure in Indonesian journalism, but his direct connection with the Times of Indonesia ended with that 1953 resignation, and the newspaper's subsequent identity was shaped by his successor.

Charles Tambu takes over

In 1953 Charles Tambu, from Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka, took over as managing editor of the Times of Indonesia, and other accounts described him as the newspaper's editor-in-chief on his return from a diplomatic posting. Tambu led the newspaper for the remainder of its life, and scholarly writing on the 1950s press consistently identified the Times of Indonesia as the paper led by Charles Tambu, in the same way that the Indonesian Observer was identified with Herawati Diah. Under Tambu the newspaper was regarded abroad as influential: an Associated Press report published in American newspapers in April 1958 introduced him as a former diplomat and the editor of the influential Times of Indonesia when it quoted his assessment of the rebellion then underway in Sumatra. That contemporary description showed that, within five years of its founding, the newspaper had become a recognised English-language voice from Jakarta whose editor's views were carried by international wire services.

The editor's path to Jakarta

Tambu's background explained the newspaper's unusual position between Indonesian journalism and international diplomacy. He was born in 1907 in British Ceylon and was of Tamil descent, and he came to the Dutch East Indies after his father and mother had migrated in search of a better life. Although he was not a native Indonesian, he represented Indonesia in international forums, most notably as one of Indonesia's representatives at the United Nations security session held on 14 August 1947, together with Soedjatmoko, Soemitro Djojohadikusumo, Sutan Sjahrir, H. Agus Salim and L. N. Palar. A profile published in the magazine Merdeka in October 1949, under a headline describing him as of foreign descent but Indonesian in spirit, recorded that Tambu, a former illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka, had steadfastly defended Indonesian sovereignty at the United Nations in 1947. His defence of the newly proclaimed Indonesian government was rewarded with an Indonesian passport from President Sukarno.

From diplomacy to the editor's chair

After the Dutch recognition of Indonesian sovereignty in 1949, Sukarno appointed Tambu as Indonesia's Consul General in Manila, a post he held until 1953. Only after that posting ended did he return to Indonesia and take up the editorship of the Times of Indonesia, which his former co-worker Mochtar Lubis had been instrumental in setting up in 1952. A later account of Tambu's wartime years described him as a Sri Lankan lawyer who had been living in Singapore before the war, was captured by the Japanese and taken to Jakarta, where he was placed in a radio camp and given the task of monitoring Allied broadcasts in English, and who became an effective supporter of Indonesia's independence movement and remained a resident of Indonesia. The sequence mattered for the newspaper: the Times of Indonesia passed in 1953 from a celebrated Indonesian editor to an editor whose authority rested on diplomatic service for Indonesia abroad and on a personal history bound up with the independence struggle itself.

Place among Jakarta's English-language newspapers

For most of its life the Times of Indonesia was Jakarta's pioneering English-language daily, and from the middle of the decade it was joined by the Indonesian Observer, first published by Herawati Diah and Burhanuddin Muhammad Diah in 1955. Scholarly surveys warned that accurate newspaper sales data for Indonesia in the period from 1950 to 1959 were difficult to obtain, and the figures that survived were estimates. A table of significant newspapers of the period reproduced in a 2025 study of Old Order press freedom, compiled from earlier Indonesian press scholarship, listed the Times of Indonesia, published in Jakarta from 1952, at an estimated 5,000 copies, far below the largest Indonesian-language dailies of the capital but within the range of a specialist English-language title. The same study noted the collective reading habit of the period, under which a single copy of a newspaper was usually read by more than two people, so that a modest print run reached a considerably larger readership than the copy figure alone suggested.

Editorial character in the liberal democracy years

Scholarship on the period placed the Times of Indonesia among Jakarta's critical newspapers. A 2025 historical study of press freedom under the Old Order observed that Jakarta newspapers published between 1950 and 1957, including Pedoman, Indonesia Raya, Harian Abadi and the Times of Indonesia, showed great concern for the dynamics of upheaval in the regions, while newspapers such as Merdeka, Suluh Indonesia, Duta Masjarakat and Harian Rakjat generally supported the central government in Jakarta, including President Sukarno, the prime minister and the army, in taking firm action against threats to national unity. The Times thus stood on the critical side of the capital's press divide during the regional crises of the late 1950s. That positioning belonged to the wider character of the era's struggle press, which adopted a critical and advocacy attitude towards the abuse of power, and in which the editor-in-chief functioned as the captain responsible for the direction and journey of his newspaper.

The newspaper and the PRRI rebellion

The regional upheaval that defined the newspaper's later years was the revolt of the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia, known as PRRI, proclaimed in Sumatra in February 1958 together with the allied Permesta movement in Sulawesi. The Times of Indonesia's response was preserved in the April 1958 Associated Press report that quoted Tambu's editorial assessment at length. Tambu wrote that the rebellion in Sumatra, aside from costing the government an estimated 15 million rupiahs, about 1,321,000 dollars, daily for military operations, saw brother pitted against brother. He added that there was galloping inflation, that the economy of the country was in a chaotic condition, that gold reserves were below ten per cent, and that the budgetary deficit that year would easily exceed the previous year's figure. The quotation showed the newspaper addressing English-speaking readers with a bleak economic indictment of the conflict's cost to the central government, and it remained the most widely reproduced sample of the newspaper's own editorial voice.

Closure under Guided Democracy

The newspaper's end came with the consolidation of Guided Democracy, the system Sukarno introduced by decree on 5 July 1959, under which the freedom to criticise the president, state officials and the military was eliminated. In 1960 the government issued a new regulation requiring the press to apply for a printing licence by signing nineteen statements declaring loyalty, support, defence, obedience and compliance, and undertaking not to publish sensational news that insulted state officials. In the aftermath of the PRRI revolt, the publishing licence of the Times of Indonesia was revoked on 31 October 1960, and publication of the newspaper was discontinued. The date placed its closure at the very centre of the Guided Democracy press settlement: on the same day, 31 October 1960, the Masyumi-owned daily Harian Abadi published its farewell editorial and chose to stop publishing rather than accept the new climate. Donald Hindley's 1964 study of the Indonesian Communist Party and Rudolf Mrazek's biography of Sutan Sjahrir both recorded the Times of Indonesia's end among the press casualties of that settlement.

Aftermath for its editor

The closure also ended Tambu's public career in Indonesia. Accounts of his life recorded that, following the PRRI and Permesta affair, both the Times of Indonesia and Indonesia Raya were deemed unfit for publication, after which life became more challenging for Tambu and he disappeared from historical records. He was known to have later relocated to Kuala Lumpur, where he remained until his death in 1965. A later historical account summed up his trajectory by describing Tambu as having become one of Sukarno's loudest enemies through his Jakarta-based paper, the Times of Indonesia. No revival of the newspaper followed, and later Jakarta English-language dailies, including the Indonesian Observer, which continued, and the Indonesia Times launched in 1974 as the successor to a different newspaper, the Jakarta Times, were separate publications rather than continuations of the Times of Indonesia.

Legacy and historical record

The Times of Indonesia survived in the scholarly record out of proportion to its eight years of publication because it stood at the beginning of Indonesia's English-language daily press. Hill treated it in both his history of the New Order press and his biography of Lubis, Feith cited its founding editor's army links, and Indonesian press histories continued to list it among the defunct English-language newspapers of Jakarta. The 2025 study of Old Order press freedom, surveying the Guided Democracy years, counted the Times of Indonesia among the critical and independent Jakarta newspapers whose absence was itself a historical fact, observing that the disappearance of papers such as Indonesia Raya, the Times of Indonesia, Nusantara, Harian Abadi and Pedoman left the press of the 1960s generally regressed in views and ideas. For a newspaper that published only from 1952 to 1960, that judgement, that Indonesian public life was poorer for its silencing, remained its most considered epitaph.