About De Indische Courant

De Indische Courant

De Indische Courant was the name of a number of Dutch-language newspapers published on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies, in what is now Indonesia. The most important paper published under that name, and the subject of this profile, was the De Indische Courant founded in 1921, whose East Java edition was published in Surabaya from 1921 to 1942 and whose West Java edition, published in Weltevreden, ran from 1922 to 1939. It was founded by the Suikerbond, the conservative trade union of European workers in the sugar industry, and it grew from a union paper into one of the largest newspapers in the colony: by 1938 the Surabaya paper tied the Java-Bode of Batavia for the largest circulation in the colonies, at 7,000 copies. It was famed in Indies press history for its fight with the ANETA news agency, whose restrictive contracts it refused, and for its vocal opposition to government restrictions on press freedom between 1927 and 1931. Like the other Dutch-language papers of Java, it ended in 1942.

Earlier papers of the same name

The Surabaya paper was not the first De Indische Courant, and the International Institute of Social History's classification distinguished the successive titles by number. The first paper under this name was published in 1870 in Batavia, classified as De Indische Courant I. A newspaper of the same name was published in Batavia from 1896 to 1900, De Indische Courant II; one of whose contributors reference works listed as the Dutch author and critic of the colonial system Multatuli, and that paper was continued as the Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië. The most important paper of the name was the third, running from 1921 to 1942, and after its demise the name appeared once more: the last paper under this name ran from 1949 to 1952, De Indische Courant V, again from Batavia. The Surabaya paper, Indische Courant III, thus stood in the middle of a sequence of five unrelated or loosely related Batavia and Surabaya ventures that shared a generic colonial title, the Indies Courant, across more than eighty years.

Foundation by the Suikerbond in Surabaya in 1921

In 1921 the Suikerbond, a conservative trade union representing the interests of European workers in the sugar industry, founded De Indische Courant, published first in Surabaya in East Java, and then also from Weltevreden in West Java. The founding made industrial sense. Surabaya was the centre of Java's plantation economy, and East Java was sugar country: the European employees of the sugar factories and estates were an organised, Dutch-reading workforce with a union that needed a voice, and Surabaya was the natural place to print it. The West Java edition followed from Weltevreden, the administrative suburb of Batavia, from 1922, giving the union's paper a presence at both ends of Java. The paper's owner-leader in its formative fight was W. Burger, who was also president of the Suikerbond, a dual role that tied the newspaper's fortunes directly to the union that had created it.

The fight with ANETA and the strangle contracts

From the beginning, the publishers were in conflict with ANETA, the Dutch news agency, partly financed by the Dutch government, which brought international news to the islands via telegraph and thus greatly improved and simplified the news gathering done up to that point by the local papers themselves. The contracts ANETA signed with the papers, wurgcontracten, or strangle contracts, were frequently seen as restrictive. The agency required papers, for example, to buy and distribute its own newsletter, De Zweep, The Whip, in which ANETA's founder settled personal scores by fulminating under the pseudonym Jan Karwats, John the Scourge. In addition, embedded conflicts of interest between the agency and the Dutch government meant that criticism was frequently stifled. De Indische Courant refused to bundle its paper with De Zweep, and was cut out of the telegraph service. For a daily newspaper, exclusion from the wire was a threat to its existence, since telegraphic news was the fastest channel of world and inter-island information. The problem was solved by the paper's owner, W. Burger, through the acquisition of a radio, which allowed the paper to gather international news by wireless and broke its dependence on the agency's telegraph monopoly. The episode became one of the best-known stories in Indies press history: a union-owned provincial paper defying the semi-official news agency, being cut off, and answering with new technology.

Opposition to press restrictions, 1927 to 1931

The paper's independence of mind was tested again by the state. When the government imposed severe restrictions on the freedom of the press between 1927 and 1931, citing the threat of Communist uprisings such as the one in 1926, De Indische Courant was one of the measures' most vocal opponents. Those years, running up to the Press Banning Ordinance, the Persbreidel, of 7 September 1931, which gave the Governor-General power to ban a periodical without prior judicial advice, were the most restrictive period of the late colonial press regime. That a conservative union's paper was among the loudest defenders of press freedom was a reminder that opposition to the persbreidel cut across the Indies press's political divisions: papers that agreed on little else agreed that the government should not be able to silence them at will. The stance fitted the paper's own history: a title that had been cut off by a semi-official agency for refusing its newsletter was not inclined to accept official control quietly.

Content, character and editorial change

Like other Dutch newspapers in the colonies, the paper's function was described by historians as being to amuse rather than to opine, and its content consisted for a large part of gossip, rumour and sensationalist news items, sometimes bordering on libel, while critique of the Dutch government was rarely printed. That general characterisation sat alongside the paper's documented stands on press freedom and the news agency, and both belonged to its record: it was a lively, popular paper rather than a solemn political journal. Its politics shifted over time. While the paper leaned social-democratic in the 1920s, under pressure from union members editor-in-chief Koch was replaced by Willem Belonje, and it became much more conservative. Belonje was a central figure in the world this profile describes: he ran De Indische Courant in the 1920s in this account, and in 1938 he became editor-in-chief of the Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië in Batavia. Another editor passed through Surabaya on the interconnected Indies circuit: Evert Jansen, after leaving Semarang's Algemeen Handelsblad in late 1929, became editor of De Indische Courant in Surabaya as well as of De Malanger in Malang. In the 1930s the economist J. C. van Leur published a number of articles in the paper on financial and economic policies, strongly supportive of economic intervention by the colonial government, giving its pages a serious economic voice alongside their gossip and sensation.

Circulation leadership by 1938

By 1938 De Indische Courant, then published from Surabaya, tied the Java-Bode, published in Batavia, for the largest circulation in the colonies, at 7,000 copies. The figure measured the paper's achievement precisely: a title founded seventeen years earlier as the organ of a sugar workers' union in East Java had drawn level with the Java-Bode, one of the oldest and most established Dutch-language papers of the capital. In the small Dutch-reading market of the Indies, where the leading Batavia daily Nieuws van den Dag counted its circulation in the same range of several thousand, a circulation of 7,000 placed the Surabaya paper at the top of the colonial newspaper world. The West Java edition from Weltevreden had run from 1922 to 1939, so in its final years the paper's strength rested on its original East Java base, the sugar belt and port city where the Suikerbond had founded it.

The end of the East and West Java editions

The West Java edition ended first, in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War. The Surabaya paper itself ran until 1942. Its ending belonged to the general fate of the Dutch-language press in that year: the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies closed the colony's Dutch newspapers, the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad and the Nieuws van den Dag among them, and De Indische Courant's 1921 to 1942 run ended with them. Unlike its Surabaya contemporary the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad, the Indische Courant enterprise was not revived after the war under its own management; the name's post-war appearance, from 1949 to 1952, was a separate Batavia paper, the fifth of the name. The Surabaya De Indische Courant, the Suikerbond's paper, remained a closed chapter of the interwar Indies.

Survival in archives and scholarship

The paper survived as a source. Delpher, the Dutch newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, provided online access to newspaper archives including De Indische Courant, and the paper's history was reconstructed in the scholarly literature on the Indies press, notably in Mirjam Maters' study of press freedom and press restriction in the Netherlands Indies between 1906 and 1942, in John Ingleson's work on workers, unions and politics in Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s, and in studies of figures such as J. C. van Leur who wrote for it. Its ANETA fight, in particular, was retold wherever the wurgcontracten were discussed, because it showed in one story the structure of the late colonial information order: a semi-official agency, a government interest, a dependent press, and one union paper that refused and found a way around.

Assessment

De Indische Courant of Surabaya was the most successful union-founded newspaper of the Dutch East Indies. Created by the Suikerbond in 1921 to speak for European sugar workers, it expanded to a West Java edition, defied the ANETA agency's strangle contracts and replaced the telegraph with radio, opposed the press restrictions of 1927 to 1931, shifted from a social-democratic lean to a more conservative line under Willem Belonje, published serious economic writing by J. C. van Leur, and by 1938 shared the largest circulation in the colonies. Its closure in 1942 ended a twenty-one-year run that had taken it from a trade union venture in the sugar capital to the top of the colonial newspaper market, a trajectory no other Indies union paper matched.