As Indonesia celebrates its 80th anniversary of independence – merdeka – from colonial rule that lasted nearly 350 years, the country is remembering the legacy of national hero Diponegoro, who is being reinterpreted for a new generation.
Two centuries ago, Diponegoro, a Javanese prince, left his royal court on horseback to launch one of the bloodiest uprisings in Southeast Asian history.
He never returned but left behind a legacy of valour that resonates with Indonesians to this day.
“This was a war that really shook the Dutch… it showed that people in Java were willing to fight, and fight for years, against overwhelming odds,” Adrien Vickers, historian and Southeast Asian analyst, tells TRT World.
The Java War (1825–1830) was not the first conflict between Javanese rulers and Dutch power, but it was the first to demonstrate that resistance could be sustained over years.
By the time the war ended, over 200,000 Indonesians were dead, Central Java lay in ruins, and the Dutch colonial machine was confronted with resistance, forcing them to retreat eventually.
For more than two centuries before the revolt started by Diponegoro, the Dutch East India Company — and after 1800, the Dutch state — had embedded itself in the archipelago, becoming a colonial machine.
First through trading posts in the spice islands, then by force of arms, the Dutch established the colony known as the Dutch East Indies.
“The Dutch East Indies was less a colony than a vast plantation economy,” writes David van Reybrouck in Revolusi. “Forced cultivation, heavy taxation, and coerced labour meant that for centuries, Java’s fertile soil enriched Amsterdam’s merchants more than its own farmers.”
In the 1600s, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) began colonising parts of Indonesia; after its abolition in 1799, the Dutch state ruled the Netherlands East Indies in the name of a “civilising mission.”
That mission masked an economy of exploitation and a regime of violence, in which torture, rape, and executions were routine. Even in its final years, colonial rule imprisoned thousands for supporting independence.
Spices and slavery
Nutmeg, cloves, coffee, sugar, and later oil flowed to Europe. The labour, often coerced or enslaved, kept the plantations and warehouses running.
“Even in the nineteenth century, slavery was woven into the fabric of the Indies,” van Reybrouck writes. “Enslaved men and women from across the archipelago were traded, transported, and worked in the service of both Dutch settlers and indigenous elites allied with them.”
Diponegoro, eldest son of Sultan Hamengkubuwono III of Yogyakarta, had watched his father resist the Dutch, if only within the constraints of court politics.
“His father had already been in conflict with the Dutch… so Diponegoro’s war was part of a longer family tradition of resistance,” Vickers says.
But when Hamengkubuwono III died in 1814, a Dutch-managed succession cut Diponegoro out. He withdrew from the palace, lived as an ascetic nobleman, and became known for his devotion to Javanese and Islamic tradition.
The immediate spark for war was the construction of a road through his ancestral lands without permission, a slight that struck at both his personal honour and the autonomy of the Javanese court.
But the resentment ran deeper: colonial interference in succession, erosion of royal authority, and the economic exploitation of farmers.
Resistance against exploitation
“Prince Diponegoro’s insurrection from 1825 to 1830 was the bloodiest conflict the Dutch would ever face in the archipelago,” writes van Reybrouck. “It was a war of faith and sovereignty, and its betrayal left a scar that never faded.”
The five-year struggle devastated the heartland, not only through combat but through famine and disease. “Something like 200,000 people, which was a large proportion of the population of Central Java, were killed during the war,” Vickers says.
Unable to defeat Diponegoro militarily, the Dutch resorted to deceit, luring him into peace talks in 1830, capturing him, and sending him into exile in Sulawesi, where he died in 1855, aged 69.
It was not the only theatre of resistance.
In Aceh, a 40-year war raged from 1873, as the fiercely independent sultanate fought Dutch invasion. The Dutch colonial government dramatised the threat of the Acehnese Sultanate to justify a war of colonial expansion.
“The Sultan of Aceh sought the protection of the Ottoman Caliph in the 1870s, appealing to a shared Islamic identity,” van Reybrouck writes. “Though Istanbul could offer little in the way of weapons or ships, the gesture inflamed Dutch fears of pan-Islamic resistance.”
In Bali, puputan – ritual mass suicide, in preference to facing surrender, greeted Dutch troops. In Sumatra, the Padri Wars fused Islamic revivalism with anti-colonial struggle.
Divide-and-rule remained the Dutch method of choice.
“The memory of the Diponegoro war was very important for Indonesians later on,” Vickers says, “and contributed to the formation of a nationalist movement.”
Birth of a nation
By the 1920s, that memory began to crystallise into a national consciousness. Indonesians from across the islands travelled to cities like Batavia (Jakarta) and Surabaya for education, mingling and realising their shared grievances.
In 1924, students in the Netherlands formed Perhimpoenan Indonesia, one of the first groups to use “Indonesia” as a collective identity.
The organisation was important in the sense that many members would later acquire important political positions in an independent Indonesia. Malay-language newspapers stitched together a national narrative.
The Second World War broke the colonial frame.
Japan arrived in 1942, promising “Asia for Asians”, releasing Sukarno and other nationalist leaders, allowing the flag to be flown.
But the reality was harsher: forced labour conscripted 400,000 Indonesians, rice was seized for export, and famine in Java killed 2.4 million people.
“Japanese rule left Indonesia in quite a mess,” says Vickers, adding massacres, political repression, and a collapse of the colonial order that created a power vacuum.
The collapse of Japanese rule left a vacuum in which Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta could declare independence in August 1945.
The Dutch returned with “police actions” – another war, killing more than 100,000 Indonesians, until the Netherlands recognised independence in 1949.
Even then, the Dutch demanded repayment of 4.3 billion guilders, the equivalent of about $15 billion today, including the costs of the war itself.
In effect, Indonesia paid for its own liberation. Rubber and oil prices during the Korean War helped it recover.
Despite the enormous human cost, the Netherlands has never issued a formal apology for its colonial rule in Indonesia.
“In the Netherlands, there has never been a full apology for three centuries of colonial rule,” van Reybrouck writes. “For decades after independence, a quiet belief lingered in political circles that Indonesians would one day welcome their old rulers back, grateful for the ‘civilising mission’.”
Dutch politics, meanwhile, remained clouded by a belief that “somehow they would welcome us back,” Vickers says.
Two hundred years after Diponegoro’s revolt, his face is on the currency and his life in novels, paintings, and monuments.
In 2025, remembrance is more than commemoration.
The Ministry of Culture is spending US$550,000 to update history textbooks. The historians involved, from Aceh to Papua, intend to centre resistance rather than subjugation: a decolonisation of the narrative, not just the land.
“Updating our history books is essential for shaping the national identity and collective memory of our people,” said the cultural minister, Fadli Zon.
