Cut Nyak Din (1848-1908): A Study of Female Heroism in Indonesia

Abstract

This is a study of how female heroism has been produced through commemorative processes in Indonesia. I trace the historical processes and the cultural and political narratives that inform what constitutes a female hero in Indonesia. The evolution of heroism in Indonesia has been shaped by images of anti-colonial military force highlighting specific visions of ideal masculinity. The amalgamation of militarised masculinity and nationalism has created the criteria for how women can be commemorated as heroes, revealing how the valorisation of women as heroes can also reinforce hierarchies of masculinity. I investigate this phenomenon through a case study of Cut Nyak Din (1848-1908), an elite woman from Aceh who played an important role in the Acehnese resistance to the Dutch in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on concepts from the field of gender, memory and Indonesian studies, I evaluate the importance of Cut Nyak Din's construction as one of Indonesia's most prominent female 'national heroes' (Pahlawan Nasional), a category officially legislated as the archetypal model of heroism in Indonesia. By understanding the evolution of Indonesian concepts of heroism, we can see how nationalist ideology, centralised state education, and regional political struggles work to produce 'heroes', and what this means in gendered terms. This study reveals the complexities and contradictions in commemorating women as national heroes. This study argues that the Indonesian narrative of an anti-imperial national female hero is composed of competing and sometimes contradictory political voices. The female hero is fabricated dependent on a need to respond to the shifting currents and priorities in modern Indonesian and local history. Indonesian and Acehnese nationalist commemorations of female heroes essentially draw heavily on Dutch representations of Indonesian female fighters, while the commemoration of female heroes in Indonesia, which seems on the surface to support ideals of gender equality, has in fact replicated gender hierarchies within diverse Indonesian narratives. Such rhetoric still remains a limited way of commemorating women's contributions. As a result, Cut Nyak Din has been imagined in ways that speak to the anxieties of Dutch imperial administrators, the aspirations of European feminism, national visions of Indonesia's search for unity, separatist goals for Cut Nyak Din's region of Aceh, Islamist visions of religious piety, and modern Indonesian women's search for powerful connections to the past. To examine this case study of one specific female hero, this study deploys methods of interviews, participation observation, and cultural-historical analysis of specific commemorative sites. This approach allows my thesis to identify the diverse forms of public memory and how they are politically constructed within intertwined colonial, official and vernacular perspectives. While this research specifically concerns the region of Indonesia, it contributes to the growing literature in interdisciplinary field of gender, postcolonial society and memory studies. Show more