The politics of beautiful Indies landscapes

Why did colonial landscape painting consistently focus on such a narrow range of views and subjects given the diversity, scope and, indeed, modernity of Indies environments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? The market for art—informed by European tastes and the colonial political context—to a large extent determined the nature of colonial painting.

Stadial (or stagist) theories of civilisation, for example, were pervasive among European liberal thinkers in the colonial period. Such theories were strongly developed in British writings on India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,³⁶ but they also informed the attitudes of politicians and intellectuals in the Netherlands, where a liberal transformation of public life had occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century.³⁷ Stadial models of development placed human societies along a continuum between barbarity and civilisation according to the primary means of their production.

Western Europe ranked at the apex of this economic hierarchy with the lowest tiers occupied by hunter-gatherers and peasants. While the theory suggested that History would propel all societies towards the top of the civilisational ladder, colonists often lacked the patience that Uday Singh Mehta has identified as central to liberal intellectual justifications for empire.³⁸ Convinced of Western Europe’s historic precociousness, imperial policy­makers supported active intervention in Asian societies to bring them out of the past in which they were widely believed to be mired and into the (colonial) present.

A commitment to environmentally deterministic explanations of differences between societies, which referred to climate and geography, was often packaged together with stagist concepts of civilisational development in European visions of ‘unfamiliar’ parts of the world.³⁹ Stereotypes of an abundant tropics had pervaded European perceptions of South-east Asian societies since the early modern era. The fertility of equatorial zones, together with their heat and humidity, were thought to make for ‘lazy’ natives, as the environment offered no incentive for harder graft. By contrast (so the narrative went), Europeans, accustomed to harsh winters that demanded innovation and endeavour for survival, were more inclined by nature to commerce and industry. Thus Europeans were well positioned to instruct South-east Asian peasants in the necessities of discipline and vigour required for a flourishing export sector.⁴⁰

That local farmers were not inclined to be diverted from their lands and labours in the interests of colonial plantation agriculture was routinely dismissed by European observers as evidence of the indolence nurtured by a generous climate. Asian slavery and its successor, indentured labour, were frequently justified on these grounds. In the Netherlands Indies, European colonists ideologically supported the importation of Javanese and Chinese labourers through allusion to the same discourse of tropical indolence—whereby workers who would not co-operate must be compelled—until well into the twentieth century.⁴¹

Dutch artists like Jan Poortenaar (1886—1958), who produced a travel memoir of his journey through the Indies in the early 1920s illustrated with his etchings and paintings, were convinced of the fiction presented in their work that rural life in the archipelago was impervious to colonial intervention.

Quite apart from creating a false impression of an Indies completely untouched by modernising colonial influences, the painterly focus on subsistence agriculture also excised the role of Indonesian ‘peasants’ in generating Dutch colonial capital as wage labourers. The expansion of colonial plantation agriculture in the late nineteenth century competed directly with the land resources available to smallholders. Farmers of the kind depicted in idyllic modes by mooi Indie painters were in fact increasingly alienated from independent agricultural production and forced into wage labour as a result of mounting colonial demands for arable land, among other factors.⁴⁵ Tens of thousands of the Javanese indentured labourers imported to work on the factory-like plantations of East Sumatra in the late colonial period were responding to this very process, for they were no longer able to support themselves on the remnants of their own land.

Indeed, the development of rubber plantations in Dutch Sumatra and British Malaya provides a case study of how South-east Asian peasants were systematically excluded from taking a larger share of colonial profits. While commercial estates were expanding in these colonies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rubber was still widely grown by local smallholders on mixed farms combining food and trade products.⁴⁶ However, the consolidation of large-scale commercial plantations in the region progres­sively marginalised local smallholders from export production.

In addition to economic factors, the foreign monopoly on South-east Asian rubber pro­duction was politically supported by colonial regimes. Planters in Dutch Sumatra and British Malaya aggressively lobbied colonial governments to exclude local smallholders from the industry, largely on the explicit grounds that they competed for arable land. Planters frequently gained the political support of local rulers, who provided the permits (in the form of long leases) for large landholdings. Indeed, Sumatran and Malay elites often preferred to keep their subjects in subsistence production because it slowed the pace of social change.⁴⁷

In favouring images of Indonesian rice farming over other modes of agricultural activity, colonial painters thus confined to the canvas what planter-lobbyists and their political allies sought to constrain in real life. The focus of colonial painters on an ostensibly independent native yeomanry, farming private or communally held lands, kept local producers out of the picture of colonial wealth creation, and conveniently shifted European viewers’ attentions away from the negative transformative outcomes of Dutch rule. Like mooi Indie paintings more generally, scenes of rice farming elided both the existence of coercive agricultural labour systems under colonial role and the substantial contribution of Asian labour to the plantation wealth that underpinned the entire colonial economic system. Acknowledging the dynamics of this scheme would have undermined the benevolent claims of the Dutch colonial state, particularly after 1900 when the liberal reform programme known as the Ethical Policy made naked exploitation an unacceptable basis for colonial rule.⁴⁸