Lecture Summary by Abdul Rahman Shah and edited by Hyojin Pak
Professor John Rossa is a historian of modern Indonesia, particularly on the 1965 massacres. He teaches at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Joining him as the moderator during the lecture session at Rumah Mandiri, Petaling Jaya is Imran Rasid, Executive Director of Citizens International.
People’s History, Elite History, and Left History
Roosa opened by explaining a small but deliberate word choice in the title: an agenda, not the agenda. What follows is meant to be partial —a reflection of what has drawn his attention after decades working alongside Indonesian historians and researchers, including through the Institut Sejarah Sosial Indonesia (ISSI) — far from a definitive map of Indonesian history as a whole.
He then turned to ‘people’s history’ and the danger of populism. It is as a genre almost every country has produced in some form; A People’s History of the United States being a familiar example. But it is not always clear who exactly counts as “the people.” Taken too far, he warns, and people’s history can turn into populism, collapsing distinct class and sectoral interests into a single, comfortable, undifferentiated whole.
Yet, he is equally wary of dismissing “elite history,” one that focuses on the elite and their achievements.. People from poor and marginalised communities are often just as curious about what elites did and thought as anyone else. His resolution is “left history,” a term broad enough to cover both the elite and ordinary people, the subaltern, within a single frame. What unites left historians across countries, in his view, is not a fixed subject but a shared commitment: to egalitarianism, and to interrogating how inequality gets justified through the stories we tell about the past. He takes Palestine as the clearest present-day case: a people demonised, he argues, precisely to justify genocide.
An Agenda for the ISSI
ISSI is on the broader history of Indonesian movement across the twentieth century. Working backwards through the turning points of modern Indonesian history — The 1965 Massacre, the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (PKI), the Guided Democracy (1959-65), the “Indonesian Revolution” (1945-49), the Japanese Occupation (1942-45), and the social movements up to 1942 — Roosa reevaluates each period, asking what remains unresolved for for historians and social movement alike.
Much of this agenda takes shape through ISSI’s own work, which has effectively served as an informal truth and reconciliation commission for the events of 1965-66 — filling a gap that Indonesia has never officially addressed. The closest thing to an official record is a 2007 report by Komnas Perempuan on gendered violence during 1965-66. Ayu Ratih, who was also present during the lecture, co-authored the report; fittingly, the commission itself was originally undergirded by researchers and activists like her. From there, an oral history project followed a similar path: starting in 2000, Roosa, Ratih and a group of colleagues began collecting oral histories from former political prisoners across Java, Bali, Sumatra and Kalimantan, work that eventually culminated in three books.
Tahun yang Tak Pernah Berakhir, published in 2004, focused on the prisoners and their families. Pretext for Mass Murder, from 2006, leaned more heavily on documents alongside interviews to dig into the small, clandestine September 30th Movement itself. Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia, which came out in 2020, turned to the massacres in multiple islands that followed. Roosa explains the grim pattern behind those killings: prisoners disappeared without any announcement, driven out at night to remote locations and killed, leaving families with no clue whether their loved ones were even dead. Despite the sheer scale of the massacre, much of his own analysis has focused on how decentralised the killing was — decisions made of individual military commanders varied from province to province.
This research trail also had legal consequences: when the government banned the Indonesian translation of Pretext for Mass Murder, Ayu Ratih filed suit as petitioner, and the case reached the Constitutional Court case in 2010, stripping the Attorney General’s office of its power to unilaterally ban books. ISSI’s work extends beyond 1965. Roosa turned next to the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (PKI) — the very target of the massacre — Roosa shifts our attention to their earlier history. Unlike any other in Indonesia at the time, the PKI was a publishing powerhouse — the only one amongst many other political parties at the time. Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat (The Council of People’s Culture, Lekra), for instance, illustrates how deeply it was engaged with culture. Half jokingly, he notes that the PKI was essentially a Gramscian organisation where it builds cultural hegemony without ever having read a word of Antonio Gramsci’s eminent text, The Prison Notebooks. Yet, Gramscian theory tends to underplay just how much coercion matters in any real struggle for state power.
For Roosa, the everyday activism of ordinary PKI members still has not been studied nearly enough. This gap — between abstract historical actors and the people who lived through them — guides the ISSI’s principles: writing history with named individuals rather than abstract collective nouns like “the PKI” or “the Army.” As a “left historian,” Roosa applies this to his own work too: naming as many as names possible, giving people a character with stories, so that readers encounter lived experience..
Another example raised by Roosa is on LEKRA’s role in Indonesian history through Tjidurian 19, a documentary that features the story of Oey Hay Djoen. a LEKRA’s affiliated members, Marxist essayist and translator who spent fourteen years as a political prisoner on Buru Island, alongside estimated around 12,000 other detainees between 1969 to 1979. Despite military pressure, Oey Hay Djoen’s wife, Jane, safeguarded his photographs from his party life ; ISSI has since digitised the collection and been working on decribing them.
He then revisited the Constituent Assembly ‘s failure between 1956 to 1959, and Sukarno’s subsequent decision to dissolve it and reinstate the 1945 Constitution, and the PKI’s support for that decision. This move that left Indonesians without meaningful constitutional rights for the next forty years, one that Roosa considers PKI’s serious strategic error. It can also reframe how Guided Democracy should be assessed, particularly regarding constitutional rights. .
The 1945–1949 period is equally pivotal. When Japan surrendered in 1945, Indonesia was left in a vacuum, with no occupying force in place. Existing hierarchies — Dutch versus Indonesian, but also hierarchies within Indonesian society — came under open question. The collapse of state authority let workers hereditary railways, peasants occupy plantations, and a violent “social revolution” break out against hereditary elites in North Sumatra. , driven by actors not always aligned with the nationalist leadership. Yet Roosa cautions that the label “Indonesian Revolution” can mislead: hoping to avoid being seen as communist and to stay in the USA’s good graces, nationalist leaders avoided the word “revolution” altogether, only adopting it in 1947–48 to reposition themselves as revolutionary leaders. To write a left history of this period from below, Roosa argues, historians need to look past nationalist leadership to other activists and to the radical social revolution itself.
Further back, major questions remain unanswered: famine deaths, forced romusha labour, and the experiences of “comfort women” under the Japanese occupation. This silence, Roosa suggests, stems partly from postwar nationalist leaders’ own collaboration with Japan. And the social movements before 1942 remain largely unaddressed: how Islam functioned as a mobilizing force for Sarekat Islam and shaped the nationalist movement; how the colonial racial regime shaped questions of identity central to anti-colonial struggle; and — echoing his point on women’s history — how existing scholarship’s focus on organizations has obscured the everyday experience of women in these movements.
Towards Common Property History
What does “the left” should mean today? Roosa brought us back to the present moment. Given capitalism’s trajectory and the ecological crisis, we now see the left also held responsible. The PKI, for instance, was oriented squarely toward economic growth and industrialization, with the Soviet Union and China as models. That model, he argued, is no longer viable. Common-property resource systems, long disregarded as backward or uncivilized, may in fact point toward the future: living with fewer fossil fuels means rethinking our relationship to nature and what economic development even means. The left, in his view, has too often pursued redistribution rather than redesign — leaving open the possibility of reorganizing society more fundamentally, at a scale as radical as the crisis demands.
The perennial problem with such an approach is the presupposed analysis of the society as a whole that allows one to determine who is “the elite.” Who is below and above? How have these relationships of power changed over time? This talk will address the various strategies that historians have adopted in the past and could adopt in the future for contributing to a ‘people’s history’ of Indonesia.
Lecture Abstract:
A common concern for historians writing in the genre of people’s history, social history, and history from below has been the history of non-elites. The Indian “subaltern studies” group, for example, defined its goal in the early 1980s as the study of ‘the people’ rather than “the elites.” The perennial problem with such an approach is the presupposed analysis of the society as a whole that allows one to determine who is “the elite.” Who is below and above? How have these relationships of power changed over time? This talk will address the various strategies that historians have adopted in the past and could adopt in the future for contributing to a ‘people’s history’ of Indonesia.
Speaker:
John Roosa is a Professor of History at the University of British Columbia (Canada). He is the author of Pretext for Mass Murder (2006), about the September 30th Movement in Indonesia in 1965, and Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66 (2020), which won the George Kahin Book Prize from the Association of Asian Studies. He has co-edited a book about the experiences of Indonesian political prisoners: Tahun yang Tak Pernah Berakhir (2004).
Moderator:
Imran Mohd Rasid is a researcher and an activist working on the issues of the Global South. He is now an Executive Director of Citizens International, an NGO based in Malaysia focussing to contribute to the development of the civic and political infrastructure of internationalism by building international coalitions, strengthening public advocacy on issues and concerns of the developing world, and empowering youth-led networks to mobilize solidarity and collective action towards confronting global injustices and advancing an inclusive and just international system that protects the planet.
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This event is organised by Pusat Sejarah Rakyat (PSR) and Mandiri in collaboration with Under The Banana Tree’s Archival Network in Southeast Asia.