Javanese Gentry

by Umar Kayam

Javanese Gentry (Para Priyayi, 1992) depicts the implicit concerns of a variety of characters for whom the attainment of that higher status is for most a dream. When Sastrodarsono returns to his village as a schoolteacher, he becomes by virtue of that position a member of the gentry class, awesomely elevated above the peasantry of his origins. From those most traditional of Javanese institutions he moves on with his bride to find his place in a line of modernizing generations active across the whole span of recent Indonesian history: the late-colonial period, Japanese occupation, war of independence, and two decades of social disorder ending in the mid-1960s with the rise of Suharto’s New Order government.